Here are a couple of interesting postmortems of Bob McDonnell’s online campaign efforts in the Virginia governor’s race:
Colin Delany of e.politics has a campaign outsider’s look at the “impressively comprehensive” Internet campaign, including website, Google ads, Ning private social network, text messaging, and social network outreach.
Mindy Finn has the inside view from the campaign’s online strategy consulting firm Engage, and talks about early investment, an internal audit, what they improved, and the (winning) results and lessons learned. Her first two lessons are particularly important: have multiple people working on online execution (no one person will be able to focus on everything), and budget for continued web development throughout the campaign.
The McDonnell campaign had enough money and grassroots enthusiasm to take the example of the Obama campaign and adapt online tactics to their own race. While their advantage of being one of the few big races this year will be impossible to replicate for Congressional and down-ballot races next year, 2010 candidates would be wise to imitate the attention they paid to using the Internet well.
[...] mentioned before that one of the big lessons of online campaigning is to budget for continuing web development. Here’s a great example of why you need to do that, from Talking Points Memo: About two weeks [...]