Howard Dean campaign's online guru explains how the candidate used the Web to change political organizing forever (first of two parts).

You're the former governor of a relatively small state, let's say Vermont. You fervently believe your country is seriously off-course. You have a plan to steer it back in the direction you believe it should go. So you decide to run for President of the United States, but the field is already crowded with big names backed by deep pockets and other big names.

What do you do?

For Howard Dean, M.D., the answer literally fell in his lap (top). You harness the power of the Internet in a different way than anyone else ever has -- to brand a candidate and redefine "grassroots."

You do something astonishing -- you give up control of the message. That'd be crazy enough. But Dean gave up control to a bunch of bloggers and young voters who don't know how politics is "supposed" to work.

And it works. More than 180,000 people jump on the bandwagon. You quickly advance from a pesky curiosity to a strong Democratic Party voice. You don't get the nomination, but you get arguably more press than any other candidate before the primaries even start -- and you earn a place at the national party table.

But first, you tap into the intriguing mind of David Weinberger as your volunteer consultant on Internet policy. Weinberger is one of the Internet's sharpest characters. He wrote comedy bits for Woody Allen and was a professor of philosophy before he aimed his deep understanding of the long sweep of history and ideas at the Internet. He wrote an official Internet guru-style book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, writes for major media and consults with blue-chip clients. He'll also be one of the keynoters at the May iMedia Agency Summit in Maryland.

So what can marketers learn from the campaign about branding?

"The thing I think the Dean campaign got right was recognizing that... brand does not emanate from the center.  Advertising does and marketing does, but actual awareness of and enthusiasm about a so-called brand comes from the market," Weinberger says.

Politicians are usually pit bulls when it comes to staying "on message," carefully crafting every utterance and sound bite from anyone remotely connected to the campaign. As Weinberger says, "Candidates have learned that they win by mindlessly repeating the same catch phrase over and over and over again in response to every conceivable question."
 
Dean's people threw that out the window.  "The thing the Dean campaign understood was that if you want to build a social network quickly, the only way to do it is by giving up some measure of control. Control throttles growth," he says. "So they very purposefully and explicitly gave up some control, a remarkable degree of control, over their message in order to allow the supporters to find one another."

Other candidates have looked at the Internet primarily as a tool for processing donations, but not as a means for generating the enthusiasm among grassroots voters that's essential to get them to open their wallets. It's a function broadcast used to provide, before it niched itself into the suburbs of oblivion. TV and saw faceless masses, rather than individual voters.

"Politics in this country has been based on the same broadcast model that communications and marketing have been based on, which is the idea that you have one person who has something to say and you want to minimize the cost of having that message reach the most number of people," Weinberger says. "Rather than… broadcasting to faceless masses, the Dean campaign said, 'Look, you’re not faceless masses.  You’re voters, and what would be really interesting would be if you were to join up with one another, and to do that, you need to be able to talk in your own voice.'"

Politics works bets when it comes from the inside out -- not from the outside in. "People don’t work that way.  We don’t want to get together with somebody else and trade campaign slogans back and forth," Weinberger says. 

"We want to talk about what matters to us, and much of what matters to us -- if we’re Dean supporters and we’re getting it together -- we’re going to want to talk about things we like about the campaign, but especially, we’re going to talk about things we disagree with because that’s what makes conversation interesting among people who share values. The Dean campaign was fine with that.  In fact, they went out of their way to encourage people to speak in their own voice about the things that they cared about. "

He says some of that was symbolic, but worked effectively. If you went to the site, you could download posters that had no preprinted slogans -- you could write in your own message. Make it yours. Speak your mind.

Enter blogging. 

What may have seemed like a random, stream of consciousness Web log by Dean supporters actually grew to meet an important goal -- to get people of the Web and out into their communities, organizing for Dean. That's what the campaign considered a "conversion," in the same way a retailer would count a sale.

"In some ways, too much focus has been put on that with the result that people think that it was disconnected from the real world campaigning that needed to be done. And the campaign on the inside never ever saw the Internet that way. They never saw it as a replacement for what they, from the very beginning, called 'mouse pads and shoe leather.' You have to do both. You have to organize on the ground. Most of what they did on the Internet was specifically designed to get people off the Internet and into their real world communities doing political organizing."

How powerful is the blog? "There’s never been an equivalent vehicle," Weinberger says. The Dean blog started with a guy named Matthew Gross, "who spoke for the campaign but did so in his own voice. He wasn’t a press spokesperson. There’s one of those too. He was Matthew. He was a guy, 30-years-old, living in Colorado and was interested in white-water rafting and politically aware, obviously. They hired this guy, and they said, 'Go ahead, speak for the campaign, but sign your name to it and sound like yourself.' That’s why they hired him.

"There’s no analogue of that in American political life, and that enabled the campaign to take on a human voice through Matthew and the other bloggers that campaigns in a mass age -- which of course this is -- have not been able to do."

Monday: Blog and guts, driving more small donations than any candidate ever, and creating a nation of Deaniacs.