Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, has promised to take his party “beyond cutting edge.” But Joe Rospars, the man behind the Obama campaign’s incredibly successful new media outreach, said that the RNC’s current internet strategy is “all smoke and mirrors marketing.”
On Tuesday, Rospars took part in a question-and-answer session about the impact of technology on politics hosted by the left-leaning think tank NDN. Rospars dinged the Republicans’ much-criticized request for a proposal (PDF) to redesign its website, laughing that his company, Blue State Digital, certainly won’t be competing for the business. (Lefty BSD probably wouldn’t respond to the RFP anyway, of course, but Rospars brought it up out of the blue—he was obviously referring to the widespread mockery it had already received.) He criticized the GOP’s email list, boasting that the Obama campaign’s 13-million-strong list was developed in an “organic” way. “We didn’t purchase lists and just add people to our email list,” he said. “The point of having a big email list isn’t just to say you have a big email list. The RNC says they have a however big email list, but the point is to actually have relationships with people so they open the message, they listen to what you’re saying, and they’re willing to do something,” he said.
Rospars suggested that it’s a mistake to see the use of social networking technologies and new media as ends in themselves—in other words, using tools like twitter and facebook are ways of mobilizing a following, but they don’t ensure you’ll get one. Without adopting “the ethos of building an organization from the bottom-up,” the GOP will have trouble catching up, Rospars said.
Meanwhile, Rospars is doing his best to make sure the GOP doesn’t catch up. He says that of the 100 best ideas he and his team came up with during the campaign, they only used about 15. He’s won’t be talking about those in public. He doesn’t want to “give anybody any ideas.”
Too bad for Michael Steele.
