Promoting Your Campaign Online

Last week I wrote a post about horizontal segmentation in political communication on my blog, and this post will look at ways you can harness the concept online in promoting your own campaigns.

The example I will use for this post is the Vote Pledge campaign from the Young Democrats of America. The desired action of the campaign is to get young voters to sign an online pledge to vote for Democrats on election day. Specifically this post will deal with getting people to take an online action, but many of the strategies are applicable to offline actions as well.

E-mail
Once you have created an online campaign you should start with your old stand-by: the e-mail. For online actions, I suggest that your e-mails do two things: first, get the people on your list to take the action, and second get them to use their own social networks to encourage others to take the action. Check out the TechPresident post on writing a good e-mail.

Call-to-action completion page
Too many times we have people take an online action and leave it at that. Your action completion/confirmation page should include a call-to-action to spread the word about the campaign. Possible actions could be:

• Send to a friend
• Share on Facebook
• Online button/profile picture

Online buttons/profile pictures
Many of your supporters will have blogs, websites, MySpace profiles, etc. where they could put up an html graphic linking to your online action page. By creating one with copy/paste html code you can increase your exposure as well as increase the Google Rank of the action page. Here is an example:

<a href="http://yda.org/votepledge"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3061/2625068863_f23311d597_o.jpg" alt="Pledge to vote Democrat on Election Day" /></a>

The same graphic can be used as a profile image for supporters to use on their social network profiles. Make sure that the image includes the link.

Status Updates
Most social networking sites now allow you to update your status, and these updates can include links. Encourage your supporters to occasionally set their update to the call-to-action of your campaign. Example: Pledge to vote Democrat in November http://yda.org/votepledge.

Instant Messenger
Encourage your supporters to use IM to contact their friends, family and co-workers to ask the to take the action. You can also have them use the call-to-action as their away message or status message similar to the status updates mentioned earlier.

Twitter
Have your supporters that use Twitter send a tweet out with the call-to-action. For more on using Twitter check out my post on using Twitter for your organization.

Blog Outreach
Reach out to bloggers and try to get them to write something about your online campaign or even to put the online button on their website. Larger blogs tend to online put buttons on their site for money, but a lot of bloggers will be willing to do this for your campaign for free if they believe in the cause. For more on blog outreach check out my Blogger Outreach 101 post.

Facebook
I have already mentioned status updates and profile pictures, but there are additional ways to use Facebook to promote your action. Message the members of your organization's Facebook group, as well as reaching out to the administrators of allied Facebook groups asking them to do the same. You can also use Facebook's share feature to post the action page and encourage your supporters to do the same.

You can also write notes on Facebook with the action and ask to spread the word. By tagging supporters in the note it will put it in their mini-feed for their friends to see as well as definitely get their attention.

You can upload the online button image to Facebook and tag a bunch of your supporters in the picture. Have the photo description ask them to take the action and change their profile photo to the image. This will put the image in their mini-feeds as well.

Continue to innovate
There are always new methods of promoting your actions online, so keep looking at the online tools that are popping up and think of ways that they can be leveraged by your campaign.

What methods do you think online campaigns can use to promote their actions? Share in the comments.