Several of the ozplogistan heavyweights have weighed in on the Getup email campaign on Senate accountability. The mass media is also a-buzz with Liberal and National Senators having trouble dealing with the volume of mail from Getup in a meaningful manner. In particular Senator Robb having a whinge to the mass media. I have called these groups flash-mobs in the past. These mobs gather around a single popular issue - in this case keeping Coalition Senators accountable - harnessing the sheer numbers of the long tail into a fervent and meaningful group. Getup will be just the first of these kinds of activist groups in Australia. Senators and Members of Parliament should get used to it.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson wrote an exceptionally insightful article in December 2004 titled; The Long Tail . The article has spawned a blog and a soon to be released book. The effect is real, the business unit I am with in the US is predominantly service-based. We recently recognized the potential of tail effects in our business.

The decentralised network of the internet has made information transferral and storage cheap. Modern companies leverage this to maintain super-large inventories so that all potential markets are catered to. A brick-and-mortar store, such as Walmart, cannot maintain economies of scale in their inventory and business unless a product sells large numbers. In music this would mean Walmart needs to sell 10,000 Britney Spears albums to make money. They cannot afford to stock bands like You Am I, or Mudhoney as they are quite simply not profitable.

People's tastes are much larger than the tyranny of the mass-market. But how much wider? Anderson uses the example of Ecast, a digital dukebox company.

meet Robbie Vann-Adibé, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?"

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We've been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto's principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books - 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the right answer, says Vann-Adibé, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

One of the reasons iTunes is wiping the floor of the likes of Walmart in certain markets, and managing to capture such a wide and diverse clientele is through meeting the long tail market. It is cheap to store a 3Mb mp3. It is cheap to download a 3Mb mp3. Where Walmart is stuck limiting their musical inventory to sure-fire mass market hits, iTunes can store all kinds of songs, because a song downloaded once is just as profitable a song downloaded one thousand times.

American Political Fund-Raising

In the 2003 primaries for the Democratic Party in the United States, it was expected that the front runners would be Kerry, Lieberman and Gephardt. Those candidates knew the lay of the land, and had a large book of wealthy donors who would come through for them despite the restrictions of the McCain-Feingold laws. Instead an upstart, Howard Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi started raising money from an innovative use of the internet. If people buy books through Amazon, and items from ebay, why not donate through it too.

Previously long tail donations had come through the expensive process of direct mail. It costs a lot to print the paper, send the letters, and then process the cheques that come in. Direct mail often chews up eighty percent of the money that comes in through fixed cost. Donations from the internet, carry little infrastructure behind them, certainly little that the candidate has to provide, and as a result is a lot more cost effective than direct mail.

The Kerry campaign quickly noticed and by the time voters went to the booths in 2004, Kerry had out-raised Bush for money. Previously Democrats had problems matching the fund-raising capability of the Republican party. The Democrats had business and Unions as their main financiers, but not the big ticket donors of the Republicans. The McCain-Feingold laws limited the amount on person could donate, but even so, the Democrats appealed directly to the long tail, and were successful.

The lesson from the Dean campaign was that many small contributions are worth more than large contributions from a wealthy few. This also gace Dean greater latitude in the issues he could pursue. Not beholden to big money, he became a voice for his constituents and donors - all several million of them.

527s

The McCain-Feingold laws also limited where the soft-money was flowing from. it left loop-holes however, and these were quickly filled by the organisations known from their place in the taxcode - 527s. These groups appealed to the long tail as well, the Democratic allied 527s raising over fifty-seven million in the first quarter of 2004. The largest of these was moveon.org . In particular, moveon has raised enough money that it can challenge the established lobby organization and parties who are funded by focused business groups. A good example of this is their advertising page which contains TV adverts. During the 2004 election cycle, possible adverts were voted on by members, to determine which was the most popular and represented the group's members the closest.

Moveon.org has managed to survive beyond a single issue, but others such as the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth , have not. The SBVT are a classic flash-advocacy group. Their target and message was extremely focused, and had no life beyond Kerry's defeat in the presidential election. This is how most flash-mobs start-out, it is a rare one that manages to continue on past the initial issue which defines their relevance.

Getup

Getup is probably the first Australia flash-advocacy group that uses the economies of scale of the internet to raise money and lobby members of parliament. The Getup folks were wise to give themselves a wide enough issue that it has relevance beyond the next election. From their about page;

After nearly a decade of conservative government, our country has changed. Millions of Australians don't like the direction we've been heading. On August 9 the Coalition government takes control of the Senate. It will have more power than any government in a generation.

The other political parties aren't providing a strong opposition, and the media is dominated by a handful of right-wing voices. People need to take politics into their own hands. GetUp provides them with a way to do this. GetUp members are building a ground-up movement of Australians who want to act, not just complain.

It is interesting to note that the links in the top right hand side of the page on Getup, mirror those of Moveon's. For instance Getup has the Australianised language of; Home, About, Get Updates, Chip In and Media. While Moveon has Campaigns, Success Stories, Donate, Sign Up and About. They both follow the same process which is probably the defining nature of a flash-advocacy group;

• Introduce yourself (About, Who We Are, Campaign, Successes etc)
• Join the group (Strength in Numbers)
• Give us money

Flash-advocacy groups cannot survive without a cause, members or money. The SBVT have died because the reason for their cause is gone. Moveon has survived because they have reinvented their cause several times to keep themselves relevant. Getup, and other Australian flash-advocacy groups which follow it, will face the same challenges to remain relevant.

Value Adding For Voters

Getup contains on its page a form which makes it simple for voters to choose their Senators, and then send them either a canned message or a customised message. This is value adding for the electorate. It can be cumbersome, annoying and often guesswork to collect all the relevant emails of MPs from the Australian Parliament House website. Getup makes the process simple and easy .

It has been effective enough that Andrew Robb saw fit to paint it as a politically motivated group with an alternate agenda on the 7.30 Report . Robb said;

There are hundreds of emails arriving in Senator's officers. They're beside themselves, just to clear the screen. They get back to their office from meetings looking for important communications from whoever, and they're confronted with screen after screen of these emails, in some cases over 200 emails. This is highly irresponsible, this is spam, this is spam.

Robb has attempted to paint the Getup group as spammers and Howard haters, thus showing their irrational agenda, and repugnant methods. It is not spam, the form contains a button which requires the user to "send the message".Secondly, volume of email is easily dealt with. Email filters are a commodity technology now, these emails are easily filtered into a folder to determine the volume of canned emails, and those that are customised. If the Senators cannot do it, then I am certain IT staff of Parliament House are more than capable. I would have been more impressed with Robb if he had of said something about how many were canned in comparison to how many were custom. Instead he spouted typical hysterical and shrill political nonsense.

Here To Stay

Last election we had www.johnhowardlies.com which the Liberal Party has since tried to use the Electoral Act to silence in an act of political retribution. Senator Abetz has been leading the charge there. We also have the Committee on Electoral Matters which is looking at these issues and potentially may make judgements which require regulation of the internet. This is short-sighted and typical of the self-interested political nature of decisions for the purpose of political outcomes.

Getup is a more organized, efficient and internet aware permutation of the flash-advocacy group that taken its cues from the American netroots and flash-advocacy movements. I have no doubt, it is just the first of this kind, there will be conservative, liberal, labor, green, democrat, religious etc etc etc etc. Any advocacy group that can rally individuals around a single issue, and get them to donate money to that issue, will have a place in the political process. Getup should not be punished because it is new, many others will also adopt this model. Politicians had better get used to it.

cam

More Reading on Getup

• Getup
• Long Tail
• Many-to-Many
• Tail Economics Meets Political Activism