Lisa LaFlamme replaces Lloyd Robertson. New beginnings or an era that has now passed?

Prior to the Olympics I heard an interesting rumour from a source close to the business that CTV’s Lloyd Robertson would be pulling up anchor and moving on after the company’s high profile gig of playing host network to Canada’s 2010 Vancouver Olympics. It was the kind of information that you’d want to triple-check and the kind of tidbit of info that you’d want to ensure isn’t confirmed from sources who had only heard the same from the original rumour monger. While it was never enunciated broadly, it graced the front of one media watcher’s blog and threatened to make its way onto talk radio. Robertson himself acted to quash the rumour declaring that he had no announcement to make and that he’d be staying on for the nightly newscast.

That is, until last evening.

The man that anchored CTV’s flagship newscast and who had done so since 1984 told friends, colleagues and the industry that it was time to wrap it up. Anchor politics have been relevant to the mainstream news business in the past and indeed, with recent shakeups including the entry of Sun News on the scene, anchor politics are in play again.

In the United States, the retirement of Dan Rather and introduction of Katie Couric set off a lot of chatter. The passing of the torch between an outgoing Tom Brokaw to an incoming Brian Williams represented a similar “seismic” shift over at NBC.

But are such events as relevant as they once were?

In an evolving media landscape, the news consumer has more options than David Brinkley vs. Walter Cronkite. As they unfold, national and international news events are disseminated in a less fixed (or indeed less anchored) manner, but rather more in a diverse, disparate, and distributed fashion. One time, sitting on a political panel for one of the Canadian networks, I found it telling and perhaps unsurprising that the host was keeping on top of emerging stories not via the news wire, but rather via National Newswatch — an amateur independent news aggregator that is well-read among political types in Ottawa. Former CTV political host Mike Duffy famously kept us up to the minute via tips sent to his Blackberry. And even since, I’ve learned that while even the Prime Minister’s Office keeps on top of news via National Newswatch and similar news aggregators, much of their breaking media monitoring operations has shifted to tracking emerging chatter on Twitter. Whole government departments are now contracting social media monitoring to keep on top of issues and to conduct their media management. The department of Heritage sought a social media guru to keep track of anti-seal-hunt chatter to provide intel of possible disruptions during the Olympics and even in the aftermath of the G20 violence, police are using social media networks to identify perpetrators.

Regarding packaged content that can be monetized, companies are scrambling to understand the landscape as it shifts. Google is set to make a serious entry later this year with its Google TV offering which will allow the further convergence of search/web/television and make it accessible to the average end-user. Google’s YouTube announced YouTube Leanback this week which previews the socially-aware web-television interface where whole channels of content will be dedicated to videos produced and shared by one’s Facebook friends, Twitter followers and Google contacts. The format promises to be open to developers and therefore we may yet see new imagined methods of information consumption emerge.

The significance of this? The media space and the distribution of content is becoming less top-down. Today, in contrast to ten years ago, it matters less to the Prime Minister’s Office to get their story on The National. Much has been written about the Conservative’s strategy of narrow-casting to local and ethnic media. Even more has been written about the waning influence of broadcast news to cable. Former PMO Director of Communications Kory Teneycke is banking $100 million of Quebecor’s money on this newer front. What may yet be the newest frontier is tapping into the emerging importance of building online networks of influencers bottom-up from a populist rather than top-down elite information distribution model.

What happens when the 500-channel universe and 15-minute news cycle gives way to an unbound media universe and “cycle” (soon to be a misnomer) consistently in flux? Will we need an anchor? Or will we be happy to float along the tide?

In old media, we see another changing of the guard and Lisa LaFlamme should be congratulated for her career accomplishments that brought her to anchor CTV’s newscast. However, it will be how she and her company adapt to a broader, more fluid and bottom-up media culture that will determine their success in the next phase. Because that’s the kind of era it’s been. Now to the future.

UK Tory GOTV E-day effort online

We’re still watching the votes come in on this side of the pond and it’s turning into a late night/early morning for our cousins in the UK as votes are counted and a hung (minority) Parliament looks like the outcome of the election in that country.

I spoke to the web gurus over at the British Conservative Party on election day to find out what they did to drive get out the vote (GOTV) efforts online. They revealed a peak into their strategy for mobilizing Britons to the polls.

First, an unprecedented buy of the British Youtube homepage’s ad unit. Cameron’s web team has admitted to me that they received millions of impressions of their video advert on e-day. Advertising on broadcast media is prohibited in the UK on election day and thus the Youtube ad placement is shrewd and effective. Part of the motivation to buy Youtube for May 7th was to keep the same rare legal platform for advertising out of the hands of their political opponents.

The UK Tories also mobilized a simple Facebook application which allowed the user to donate their status update message to a GOTV message for the Tories on election day. We saw a similar tactic used during the previous US presidential election for both McCain and Obama.

An email was sent out from David Cameron to the UK Tory supporter list for election day:

and later in the day, a second GOTV email from London mayor (and Conservative) Boris Johnson:

Finally, but most importantly, the integral element of the Tory e-day e-GOTV strategy has been Google advertising. The Tories have purchased keywords relating to their leader and to their political opponents and have targeted the ads geographically in key ridings.

And now, we continue to watch the votes come in. The magic number to beat a Labour/LibDem coalition is 310 seats, whereas a majority would be won with 326.

Rob Willington presents at the Manning Centre conference

Rob Willington is the brains behind the campaign that got the GOP’s 41st Senate vote in the Massachusetts special Senate election.

He gave a lunch time presentation on social media and how the MA republicans used online technologies to elect Scott Brown to the senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, a Democrat.

On Facebook, Brown advised that politicians should engage potential voters not just with political content but with non-political content as well.

With YouTube, Willington advised to use YouTube as a publisher as a search engine. This means to promote relevant keywords and content.

Twitter was used as an example to use every facet of a social media strategy to promote means by which a campaign can collect data about its supporters.

The Brown campaign was one of the first national campaigns to use Google Docs to manage data flow into spreadsheets to manage RSVP lists and donor lists. Forms feeding into spreadsheets automatically populate your lists.

Google News alerts are appropriate for campaigns to gather new information as its posted on your candidate and their opponents.

Data is gold in a campaign. Data collection can be done via petitions, polls and events.

In the US, talk radio is dominated by conservatives. The Brown campaign collected 70,000 mobile numbers from advertising short codes on lawn signs and twitter. The Brown campaign would send texts when their opponent was on radio on would include a call-in number to jam the lines with Brown supporters.

Ning was used to create the “Brown brigade” to create local groups. Ning is like Facebook but a whitelabel solution to mobilize local cells in your campaign.

Willington was able to target online ads to activists inside and outside of the state discretely. For ads inside the state the ad would be for volunteers. For outside the state, the ad would be to make calls from home to voters within the state. GOTV ads would be visible to Repubican heavy areas on election day.

By the end of the campaign, voluteers were waiting an hour and a half in line outside of the campaign office to make calls.

Willington advised that volunteers have more skills than licking envelopes and making calls. Find skillsets in your volunteers (iphone app development, final cut pro) and put them to work.

Moneybombs were successful for the Ron Paul and Scott Brown. The Brown campaign invented the “Voter Bomb” where people could sign in and claim responsibility for bringing out a number of their friends to vote for Brown.

The Brown campaign changed how campaigners win elections online. Willington gave a great presentation.