Every part of a viral marketing campaign targeted at raising pressure on the U.S. and other governments to work towards the capture of Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, called "Kony 2012," is fascinating. (Some supporters also invented the hashtag #stopkony, hence the headline.) The campaign intends to pressure specific American elected officials, using the newfound power of networked public opinion to spur more action. Last year, President Barack Obama ordered 100 military advisors to help the Ugandan military remove Kony. But the campaign's scale and the narrow focus of the advocacy in its centerpiece, a free 30-minute web video with high production values, raised a laundry list of questions about its sponsor organization, their exact goals and their mission. Read More

On Pinterest, the hot new social network, all politics is visual. The social media darling of the month has been taking off particularly among users with an interest in food or fashion. But with an audience that's reportedly 68 percent female, it's also prime ground for political messaging targeted specifically to female swing voters. Read More

Jim Pugh, CTO of Rebuild the Dream (and before that director of analytics and development with Organizing for America), recently shared with techPresident some slides from a New Organizing Institute training that he's ... Read More

Sunday night, March 29, Carl Elkin posted a humorous take-off on the Passover Seder story (aka the "Haggadah"), imagining it as a series of wall postings on Facebook. Within a day his Facebook Haggadah was all over the ... Read More

Ever wanted to be able to show someone exactly how a "meme" moves across the web in real-time? Anthony Hamelle of Linkfluence has posted a video doing exactly that. He zeroes in on two political videos that made a big ... Read More

We could be wrong, but here’s a prediction about the power of viral campaigns: By the time the dust settles on the storm kicked up by MoveOn.org’s highly provocative “Petraeus/Betray Us” ad in The New York Times ... Read More

What is a real "viral campaign"? Does it even make sense to use the word marketing alongside the word viral? And why does the 2008 race seem to be almost devoid of real word-of-mouth/web success stories? Read More

The major presidential campaigns have put tons of effort into creating websites, building their own social networks, creating online videos and reaching out to voters through Facebook and MySpace, but they're so far ... Read More