Duda Propaganda

During the 2010 national elections in Brazil, WebStrong’s Netroots DNA technology platform was used by over dozen of statewide candidates for Governor and Senator. Having partnered with legendary Brazilian media consultant Duda Mendonca, the WebStrong technology solution helped revolutionize the way campaigns are waged and won in Brazil.  We had a great team in place for the campaigns: Bruno Hoffman is in Brazil, leading the effort with the Brazilian Coneqt team. Matt McMillian (from BuzzMaker) was on the team with us from the beginning doing internet strategy. Evan Moodywas been the project manager for everything with Daniel Drehmer on the technical team.

Translation

The Netroots DNA’s backend offers local translation, so all forms, tools and other features and functionality appear in the native language.  All of our platform, in the front end and back end was completely translated to Portuguese so it appeared that this was a Brazilian piece of software.

Managing Content: 

With full scale campaign teams producing fresh content at the speed of news, it was important for all of the Brazilian campaign teams to have many different staffers managing the content process.  As part of the Netroots CMS, the campaign staff could create their own content categorization process and use tags.  

On blog posts, news items, and videos, we allowed supporters to share their comments.  With the Netroots Platform's versatile "user roles" functionality, we were able to have campaign volunteers and staff moderate the comments to ensure quality.  

To visually map the impact of the candidate's content, we generated cloud tags which allows staff and supporters spot trends in what was being discussed on the website. 

In all, over 500 news articles, 1000 blog posts, and 51,000 comments were written.

Contests and Policy Crowdsourcing: "The Skaf Example

One very effective use of our platform was done by having online contests where candidates would put a challenge to their supporters.  One such contest was from Paulo Skaf, a candidate for Governor in the state of São Paulo, who invited his supporters to develop a solution to one of the state's problems.  Then, using our polling feature, Skaf asked his supporters to vote on their favorite question.  The winner would be able to present this directly to the candidate on a live webscast.

Because anyone who submitted a proposal wanted their proposal to be picked, there ensued a social media race where all of Skaf's supporters were tweeting and retweeting to try to drive votes to their submission.  This buzz is a testament to the power of the Netroots platform as a launching board for crowdsourcing and new media governance.  

In the end, over 10,000 people voted on the top 10 proposals, and an 18 year old student won the contest by driving over 3,000 votes from popular social media sites. 

Results: 

As you can see, WebStrong's Netroots platform catapulted our candidates overwhelmingly toward victory.  We had 13 candidates, and 10 of them won.