Last week Mark Warner held a press conference in "Second Life," a virtual world where people fly, build cool things and pay for sex. A new kind of marketing company, called "Millions of Us" arranged the gathering at a virtual theater with room for a thousand or two. Less than 30 Second Lifers showed up.
Considering that people can teleport anywhere instantly in second life, the sparse turnout was a huge failure. Tens of thousands were online at the time of Warner's event. Second Lifers spend an average of four hours per day in the virtual world -- so it's not like they didn't have time to check out the first pre-presidential visit to a virtual world.
Why? No one told them. And therein lies the key lesson for all politicians attempting to take their campaigns online: don't leave your organizer behind.
There is no magic on the Internets, no matter what Ted Stevens told you. It's true that the Internet has made many things easier for campaigns: communicating with millions of supporters for free via email, allowing the grassroots to self-organize with simple web tools, enabling volunteer researchers with blogs and wikis, etc.... When used properly, the Internet gives you more results for less work.
But you still have to do the work.
- Guerrilla ads will be viewed by tens of thousands on YouTube - but only if you or your supporters: 1) make them, 2) make them great, and 3) get them mentioned in the press or laboriously push them on the blogs and elsewhere.
- You can mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers in key states to do productive work for your campaign - but only if you sign them up, ask them to volunteer, and give them some basic tools to work with.
- You can use text messaging to help your volunteers and local campaigners better coordinate with each other - but you have to do the work of spreading best practices and systems for them to use.
You might even be able to win over a fast-growing virtual world by campaigning there. But in politics, "just showing up" is not 90% of success, but merely another opportunity for fun at your expense. The same is true on the Internets.
And on that note -- fire up your Photoshop people...
(MAC users, get the Comic Life file here.)