This started out as a quick reply to Mark Laggin’s post on Technology and 21st Century Caucus Ops.  It basically turned into a post in its own right.  Cross posted to (as opposed to from) my blog.

The paradigm shift we are starting to see is in the decline of one-to-many “broadcast” communications methods as an effective voter contact and voter persuasion tool.  Mark talked about phones.  Phones are especially vulnerable for two reasons.

One, the proliferation of cell phones, Internet telephony and the lack of centralized directories for both begins to limit traditional phone campaign methods to the a diminishingly useful or relevant legacy PoTS (plain old telephone service) universe. 

The second factor is linked to the first.  The inability to reach additional voters outside the PoTS universe leads to more intense competition for those voters using the tried-and-true methods campaign staff know.  This leads to what we saw in 2006 which is the almost complete alienation of voters to any phone contact and utterly diminishing returns on phone contacts

I believe that by 2012 or so the traditional phone bank and telephone-based voter I.D. campaign techniques will be almost completely shunned by voters and practically useless to campaigns. To which my reaction as a voter is, “Hallelujah!”

I think that what begins to replace these phone-based methods (and other broadcast methods, see below) will be a lot more palatable to voters.  In the place of the PUSH of traditional campaigns intruding on our lives will be more of a PULL by voters self-selecting a few campaigns that they would like to be contacted by or to investigate themselves.  Campaigns are no more immune to the technoculture change being wroght on the rest of the business world, than any other idustry.  They are however, very conservative and risk-averse institutions. I think we will see more Dean-like “break-from-the-back” incidents as insurgent campaigns embrace these models as front-runners/incumbents overlook or dismiss them.  Although, it looks to me like both the Edwards and Obama campaign “get it.”

What’s to get?  The hallmark of the new business and marketing paradigm is: decreasing relevance of one-to-many broadcast models of communication and increasing relevance for many-to-many “bazaar of conversations” models.  In this case, we can think of a phone bank (or more, precisely the loathed robo-call) as crude broadcast methods.  Think of a world where TV and Radio did not exist and phones were the primary means of communications.

This also affects conventional broadcast communications methods.  As the TV and radio viewing and listening audiences splinters more and more, as more and more content consumers move away from the traditional one-to-many, time-specific model of TV and radio to time-shifted, commercial skipping recorded consumption, TV and radio advertising buys are, again going to become much less relevant.  In fact, it is already starting to look like a lot of campaigns would get more attention from voters if they would just put all the cash they spend on TV and radion and just make a pile of $1 bills and burn it then post the video on YouTube.

We have seen how these trends are going to play out and what forms of campaign communications will replace the legacy methods. Website interactions in a social networking context (e.g. MySpace and MyCandidatename pages — both the Obama and Edwards campaigns are executing this well.  More advertising that is released straight to web.  More varieties of advertising.  A rising tide of small dollar donations will result in a sort of candidate futures market.  Voters will give small amounts early to two, three or more candidates they think are worth seeing more of.

We will also see more reliance on affinity campaigning.  Campaigns will encourage staffers and volunteers to spread the word among their affinity groups, be these churches, service clubs, community organizations, or just one’s social circle.  This begins to produce a large group of self-selected interested voters.  Remember the old Breck commercial?  “You tell two friends, and they tell two friends…”

What all of this means of course are that the financial barriers to entry get lower and the money race assumes less importance.  We will see more and more break-from-the-back candidates-of-the-moment.