IPDI Politics Online Conference

A bunch of us "grizzled new media veterans" (as John Durham put it) are down in Washington, DC today, speaking to political and cause-related marketers about the power and practical applications on online marketing and advertising. Among the attendees are myself, Durham, Scott Heiferman of Meetup and i-traffic fame, Kevin Lee of Did-it.com, Hugh McGoran from Knight-Ridder, Michael Zimbalist from the OPA, Adrienne Skinner from Yahoo and several others. Pictured above are Nick Nyhan from Dynamic Logic and Allie Savarino of Unicast.

One thing I've noticed about the folks in the political marketing arena is that they're running into many of the challenges we experienced in the consumer marketing space years ago as the Internet began to develop as a commercial medium. There is a significant educational process that needs to take place. Many attendees here are stuck in the "online advertising doesn't work" mindset that many folks in the consumer marketing space experienced after the dot com bubble burst. Others haven't the faintest idea of how to get started.

At the same time, great strides are being made in the grassroots application of online technology, especially community tools like blog applications, message boards and discussion lists. One unanswered question from the morning sessions is "How do we get a message out to the web community at large?" I plan to discuss this in great detail in my 2:30 session with Michael Zimbalist, Kevin Lee and John Durham.