This last weekend, I was on a panel discussing how to put together an internet team. One of the questions dealt with how a campaign deals with the roll out of new internet products or campaign tech initiatives. It's a good question, because there's a lot of different things that a campaign can persue. Here's how I answered it, and what I think is a succinct guide for doing R & D in the campaign:

--Look out onto the internet for what's being done. One of the Republicans on the panel, Chuck Defeo, remarked that campaigns are a terrible place for R & D to happen, and that's pretty true. It's the rare success that isn't a replicate of something else already under the sun. It's also true that campaigns tend to look toward the last cycle for what to do in the next election. In order to create innovation then, look out at what's happening in areas outside of political campaign websites.

--Don't try everything, less is more. When I was at SXSW last year, I became indoctrinated by the techies with this mantra. For the political process, it's a good match. The campaign narrative is set by the media and blogosphere, and there's a short attention span and a lot of noise. Doing one thing right, instead of a dozen things half-assed, makes the difference between a signal getting through and clutter lost in the shuffle.

--Work with the brand that is your candidate. This is probably the toughest task. It'll get a lot easier as the internet populace comes closer to a reflection of the general populace. That's because politicians already have their base, and it then becomes a matter of working within those like-minded internet communities. It's important to do outreach across wider blogospheres, but for rolling out new efforts, work it in a place you know will succeed.

The way this came up, was in a question that asked about how I got Mark Warner to agree to going into Second Life and have an avatar of himself. Sure, it highlighted that he gets new technologies and that he'll engage people where they are; but it was also the 'in' for anyone that tech persuasion & crowd to take a look at Warner (especially in regards to his policy stands regarding tech issues), and once they did that, seeing where he stood on issues like net neutrality and saw he had IT credentials, his political base expanded.

A timely and targeted rollout is also why Howard Dean successfully embraced Meetups, or why Barack Obama has had success with with social networking on his website, and John Edwards with his event organizing. Regarding these last two, Obama and Edwards, both are far and away the leaders in organizing through the internet. I was wondering how they were doing in comparison, so went to both sites and looked around for events within 100 miles of Des Moines in the next couple of weeks. For Edwards, there were 12 events, and for Obama there were 13 events. I then went to Hillary Clinton's site, and found only 1 event within 100 miles of Des Moines. Drew Miller has a report from the ground in Iowa that reflects a similar scenario. It points toward what I see as shaping up: Hillary having command of New Hampshire, and Obama vs. Edwards fighting it out over Iowa.

And here's a bonus, for the extreme political junkies, Drew has created a caucus math spreadsheet for Iowa-- now that is a worthy one-off for the blogosphere.