Good afternoon, everybody. Im mark kennedy, the director of the graduate school here at George Washington university, and we welcome everyone here from George Washington university to our panel on digital complaints, 2012 and beyond. We give a special welcome to our cspan audience thats joining us. We also give a special welcome to those from the American Political Science Association that have come to all day seminars here in advance of their conference study tomorrow. At the graduate school of political management, we are very pleased that one of George Washingtons trustees, Mark Shenkman who is with us here today has funded a series of research an digital campaigning. As weve all seen, the world in all aspects of our life is going more digital and we want to make sure that our students are at the forefront of understanding how you apply big data for political success. So todays seminar is very timely. Im very pleased to be collaborating with this with the school of media and Public Affairs and frank sessna will be leading the conversation here. Frank has a great background, a multimedia platform to make sure that were highlighting the best innovations in sustainability and he is an Emmy Award Winning journalist prior to being the leader of the school of s and pa, he was with cnn and ap for 21 years. Please welcome to the podium, frank sessna. Thank you, mark. Good day, everybody. Welcome to George Washington university and the jack morton auditorium and the school of media and Public Affairs. We like to say we are the cross roads of the school of media and Public Affairs for where media and politics, communication, information meet, collide, explode, whatever verb you choose, they do it here and were very pleased and very honored to be a part of this event today. I want to thank you again for joining us at this digital campaigning 2012 and beyond discussion. This is the first of our fall events. We hope that you will join us for subsequent events as well. We have other ones upcoming on september 9th hosting a panel of journalists well be discussing covering the midterm elections. This will include professionals, journalists from roll call, mcclatchy, meet the press, washington post, all of them who just and purely coincidently happen to be alumni of the George Washington university. Please join us for that. You wouldnt want to miss that. We heard mark kennedy thank Mark Shenkman and i join him in thanking him. I would also like to thank paul wilson whose contribution helped make it possible to host the absa preconference which many of you attended today. Paul is a member of our National CounselAdvisory Board for media and Public Affairs. Hes the founder of Wilson Grand Communications and we thank him for all of his service to the school of media and Public Affairs. Id also like to do a shoutout to my colleagues, Steve Livingston and dave carp who are cochairs of this years absa preconference, so thank you to you both. I also want to congratulate one other colleague, professor Silvio Waisbord who is named the journal of communication. Hes stepping down as editor in chief of the International Journal of press and politics and his successor, Rasmus Nielsen is with us today. Please join me in congratulate is them. Now well go online. Well go digital. Id like to introduce our two guests today, and id like to ask them to come out as i do so. Zach moffit is the cofounder of an Advertising Agency that has served over 220 campaigns and organizations. Please have your seat. He was the 2011 digital director of mitt romney for president where he managed the campaigns Digital Strategy and will have a great deal to tell us about that. I would like to welcome michael slabe. Hes the managing partner of a new Company Helping to solve creative capital. I like that. In addition, he was the chief integration and innovation officer in 2012, obama for america, where he insured the implementation of technology across the campaign. So it would seem we have the two campaigns here, and im going to go and take my seat in the middle. Welcome to you both. I explained in addition to our cspan audience we have a number of students, graduate and otherwise who are here and faculty. So be very targeted in your comments. I want to start broad and then well come down and compare your campaigns. I know youll have complete agreement on all things, looking back. What three things would each of you say are the most significant Game Changers or strategy changers in this online world in your worlds of campaign. You want to go first . Sure. I think the ubiquity of social media has changed the way we communicate, the way citizens communicate with governments and i just think the fundamental nature of the communication landscape is different than its been in the past. We have a tendency to talk about social media through the lens of a network, very naturally because we see them as social networks, facebook has promoted this concept very heavily. I think weve advance today a stage where all Communications Functions like a graph where we are nodes in a graph and interconnected in all kinds of ways, whether we are individuals, we are campaigns, we are companies, we are Media Companies and our ability to understand the interrelationships and the power and the value of strategic indirect communication is as important as the value of strategic direct communication. Whats strategic direct and indirect . Direct communication is what i say to you. Indirect communication is what you hear about me from someone else. That can be done haphazardly at random which it will be done whether you like it or not, or it can be something thats part of how we try and build efforts around helping people engage with each other and the power of horizontal communication as one of the fundamental communications in the way media functions. Media used to be high arcual. Publishers reached an audience and everybodys roles in that system were fixed which is sort of boring and unexciting. I didnt think it was boring and unexciting when i was doing it. Its a little more complicated now. Ubiquity of social media. Cloud computing has changed whats possible in terms of our ability to build and manage our infrastructure. We talk a lot about the differences between our campaigns and the differences between our campaigns in 2012 relative to the application of technology versus the development of technology which is a totally different bag of cats. But the rise of ease and accessibility of cloud communication can really change things. One more. I have to do one more . No. Those two were good. No, i think the last one that i would say is still really important goes to the question we were having when we were back stage which is the modern Political Campaign hasnt changed that much since 1840 or 1896. We were having a political debate. But the idea of engagement and communication and the durability of the Strategic Value of empowering people to drive an Organization Forward is completely independent of Digital Tools, social media, email, facebook, twitter, whatever is going to be new next week, and that digital is a force multiplier for things Like Campaign and organization of any type needs to do well. It is not we dont because we have developed Digital Tools we dont now have digital outcomes and goals associated with the organization. Were still trying to win votes. Thats something thats easily overlooked. Zach, what are your top three . Michael is right. The premise for 2012 for us is we thought digital in 2008 had been a list building and fundraising exercise at scale. It did a lot of other things but that was the core competency at a digital level. A lot of things were alluded to but the audience werent there via facebook or twitter to go beyond that. In 2012 it was the First Campaign where you would have people who would vote for you but never went to your website but they interacted on facebook or twitter or maybe email but never having gone directly to your site. So you were trying to think about what does that experience look like and as a result that plays into the things that have changed the most, redefining your budget where you put data and digital at the center and fund as a result. I think the secondary component is actually even though weve become more advanced in technology, the role of a human is so much more advanced than ever before, like the staffing. When i look at the Obama Campaign i was never very jealous of the technology. I was always the vision, the ability to hire so many staff and to fund so many staff and to have that process is something that was really unique to what 2012 showed us. When we look post 2012, some of the things that are being missed, lean and mean does not mean lean and mean. It means were not doing stuff. Were going to cut corners and hope in five weeks that 1,000 gross ratings points get me over the line. I think that process has shifted. If anything the role of social media is more powerful at the local level and yet its all talked about at the president ial level. There are all these different elements to go through. I think budget, staffing as it goes through and i think how you leverage technology. I think this belief that democrats are ahead or republicans are ahead and this thing flips over 8 years and normally someone in power has a nice effect on that. I dont think its like that anymore. I think its the ability to take technology and leverage it and are you building for yourself or trying to glue pieces together. I think that will always be the challenge for campaigns as they move forward. Who is in power . The candidate, the campaign, the consultants, god forbid the public . Hopefully in some ways its all of the above. I think the capacity as zach said the local smaller races, smaller and challenger campaigns to reach audiences that you may never have been able to reach without tools like this, operate at scale, some of the things that we were able to do that sort of shouldnt scale, its too personal, its too much about one to one communication, sort of shouldnt be able the work at the scale that we were able to do except for the capacity to engage and drive a ladder of engagement via the internet. Thats the only way you end up with 2. 2 million active volunteers doing the exact same thing a volunteer has always been doing in a Political Campaign. I think more opportunities to engage and listen and get more information in more places is good for voters and citizens. I think the transparency and the discipline thats required of candidates is good for them as candidates. I think any time theres something new, consultants are going to benefit and find a way, but thats part of the system, too. I agree. I think that the challenges are different. Digital has allowed the apparatus of the campaign to be choken up. Theres a lot of Younger Generation of people to be involved earlier and had their voices heard. I think that probably three president s before michael and i it would have been a whole different role in a campaign. It just wouldnt have been a possibility. So our experience, theres no such thing when someone says theyre a social media expert. It just means they really like it. There are some things that make sense relative to the brand or the client or the campaign, but there is just kind of like the separation that this constantly evolving and just when you think youve got your hands around it it continues to evolve and its no longer in this lock box of this is the way it has to be. I think thats empowering and president ial campaigns if you didnt have social media the role of technology would be the same 8 to 12 states and people wouldnt get to participate. Its kind of like extended the ability for people to participate. It hasnt changed where the candidate goes. If people can it moves dollars. Social media and fundraising as a whole, thats why it started there. Its so easy to track that. You can see the conversion as youre going through the process. The use of social media. I look at marco rubio after the 2013 state of the union when he drank the water bottle. Thats a specific moment but a generational model. If he was an older candidate, no one would have talked about it. It completely changes the conversation in a matter of seconds. Something that social media allowed him to do and change the conversation. Ann romney had that moment with us when hillary rosens comment occurred in 2012 and she was able to cut through the clutter. I can promise you having being there that was not where we started the communication. It was the last thing we did but it changed the entire conversation. Thats where social media as leveled the Playing Field and allowed people to have followup conversation. Probably wouldnt you coming to you actually. Thats okay. What zach said about investing early is really important and institutionalizing the values of engagement and Relationship Building as an essential part of the campaign so that digital becomes i used this phrase before but it becomes a force multiplier for the things youre trying to do relative to Building Community and empowering people to participate in a process. That means that digital is going to drive whatever rules are present in the campaign. The tools that we use and zach uses are the same. I always think its sort of funny. Its not like we invented fusion and didnt share. Were using them differently and applying them differently. The constraints around our campaigns were very different in 2012 so how restaffed, budgeted, the time we had to plan was a wild advantage for us that i think gets overlooked a lot. In terms of coming to us and where you start, you start early with building relationships and you have to start with a premise that you are willing and interested in engaging in sort of a humble way as a participant in a process with others. Are you suggesting that a politician is going to engage in a humble way . Yes, if theyre going to do it well. I think we continue to see traditional candidates thinking in Traditional Communications terms one way, how can we use these tools to broadcast to another audience. You think something fundamental has changed . These are not broadcast tools. If you use them as broadcast tools they will be only marginally effective. If youre using them as a mechanism for communication building relationships, they can become something greater. If youre interested in using facebook as another version of the channel 7 news its going to be boring and people would see through it really fast. We almost tell them we will help them set up their Facebook Page so its tagged the right way and has the right images but after that we say we cant respond for you. The worst thing that will happen is you respond and they go to the supermarket and they talk to a person and they say i have no idea what youre talking about. If youre running for lets say recorder of x county, youre talking 5,000 votes each way, plus or minus 300 votes. You only need 15 volunteers, 30 volunteers to make a huge difference and thats what the tools have done. They have leveled. What people like michael and myself can do is help you eliminate your wasted time. What we do is learn from our mistakes and hopefully we can help you take the most of your time and be as efficient as possible, but at a certain point if were the ones having a conversations that will come through quickly and as soon as that comes through youre in a very tough spot. What zach said before, the investment thats required is largely human, that if youre going to participate in these conversations and be engaged and were using these tools and these networks, its a huge commitment of time and energy. You need to be prepared to engage and respond in a dialogue. You need to be prepared to create content on a constant basis. That is a people have a tendency to say its the internet, its free, its social media, its free. Using the tools is free. Using them well is a talent and means a team that you are going to staff and resource appropriately to do this well and maintaining relationships with millions of people at a National Level means a big team. Is that a dramatic departure for candidates in the way theyre going to engage through a campaign, or is it merely an evolution . Retail politics always has been about a conversation if youre going to do well. If you knock on someones door and you give a stump speech, theyre not going to stand there with you for very long. Is it merely transferring whats been done anyway or is there something fundamental here . Being able to do essentially youre talking about being able to do retail politics at a distance. Instead of talking to a voter you can talk to millions of voters through a team, through platforms, that you are doing some of those same person to person and one to one Relationship Building scale. I do think one. Things that it does fundamentally change is pace. The requirement of producing content in a real Time Engagement and real time response we talked a lot about theres a phrase of Rapid Response in politics and Rapid Response is too slow. Real time response is this fundamental natur