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UPDATED AT 6:05 PM: We’ve reported that a controversial flier has circulated around Jersey City with the false claim that Senator Brian Stack has endorsed city council candidates Omar Perez and Sue Mack. The flier also prompted a threat to file a complaint with ELEC by At-Large Councilman Ray Velazquez, who said that the flier lacked the required language attributing its authorship. Along with this statement, Velazquez’s campaign released photos of the flier.

Now, however, a new, more complete photo of the unclaimed flier shows the “paid for” line clearly at the bottom of the picture. Philip Swibinski, the spokesman for Velazquez’s re-election campaign, says his unnamed source “assured” him that another version of the flier exists that does not include the line. Swibinski promised to provide a copy of the other flier tomorrow.

Regardless of which flier has been seen, both Perez and Mack’s campaign managers claim it to be a fabrication.

The fliers first became a contentious topic at Wednesday night’s City Council Candidate Forum, when the controversy caused an outpouring of criticism from rival candidates who were skeptical of Perez and Mack’s denials.

But Perez’s campaign manager, Gerald Reiner, maintained this denial, suggesting instead the fliers were meant to be “the kind of distraction” that comes about at the end of a campaign.

“I’ve been doing elections from 2004 until now, and this is the time period when people pull out all the stops, especially when you don’t have money to do an effective campaign,” Reiner said. “It’s a distraction from the real issues, like crime, high taxes and an ineffective administration.”

Sue Mack’s campaign, managed by Sean Caddle, was equally adamant in their denial of knowledge of the flier. Earlier, Caddle had suggested Velazquez and Ahmad’s campaign should make a serious effort at retracting a mistake in their mailer that wrongly represented the number of city layoffs last year.

“There’s no parallel between their mistake and this,” said Caddle. “We didn’t produce the piece, they did put out their mailer.”

Swibinski agreed the parallel was incorrect, but only because the mailer mistake was “an error” and the campaign flier is illegal.

“Their flier breaks the law, our mistake does not,” he said. Swibinski did acknowledge his campaign’s mistake, but said the candidates had no plans to refute the error. When asked why not, he simply said, “No comment.”

In Velazquez’s statement, he accused the rival candidates of “engaging in the same old dirty tricks that have been a blight on Jersey City politics for years.”

“Putting out literature without a paid for line is akin to lying straight to the face of voters. They should be ashamed of themselves and owe Jersey City an apology.”

But Reiner maintains he’s not worried — for one thing, he still denies the flier’s authorship, and for another, he says this threat is more of the typical gamesmanship found in the final push up to an election.

“During this time period, people will say they’re filing ELEC violations just to say they’re doing it,” he said.

A month before the BOE election in April, the Fulop team asked 100 volunteers to enter the names of ten people likely to vote for their candidates into a mobile database system called Campaign Connect. The system allowed them to add email addresses and link potential voters with specific issues of interest. Forty volunteers added 1,000 leads that month, and the campaign later sent email reminders to the volunteers asking them to remind those people to vote.

“We wanted to make them accountable for a certain action,” says Candice Osborne, partner and CEO of C&S Strategies, which built the Campaign Connect system. The digital technology and consulting firm is located on Morris Street in Paulus Hook.

Fifty-six percent of those volunteer-provided voters came out to vote, as determined through voter records, according to Kara Silverman, Fulop’s media director.

To assist in the get-out-the-vote process, Osborne says, observers kept track of who voted via mobile devices or laptops, automatically updating the campaign database so volunteers knew not to bother contacting people who already voted.

The system allows Fulop’s team to take information gleaned from petition drives, events, and other interactions with voters, and attach it to more basic, publicly available voter file data. Osborne considered enhancing the voter file with purchased marketing data — usually information estimating household income or demographics — but in the end she deemed it mostly “junk.” It’s part of the reason she and the Fulop team wanted to develop a tool to better collect and organize real information about real Jersey City voters.

“We want to go on our own, using volunteers and petitions,” Osborne says. “We’re getting better data there.”

Initially, her firm developed the system to assist Fulop himself, as he needed a way to add information learned when speaking with potential supporters to a readily accessible database. “He is very good at talking to people, but he missed opportunities to store information,” says Osborne.

The use of sophisticated digital tools for political organizing has become more prevalent for presidential and congressional candidates since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign popularized it. However, that modern approach hasn’t yet trickled down to local election operations in many cases. (See our recap of 2009′s mayoral candidates use of the web here.)

In addition to the mobile voting day effort, the Fulop team also bought online advertising before the election. (JCI readers may have spotted image ads featuring the three school board candidates, as well as for their rivals.) Like organizing through digital tools, online advertising is a common practice in national and statewide races that remains somewhat rare in smaller municipal races.

Facebook has also become a platform for advocacy around local political issues, so it should come as no surprise that political candidates and groups have embraced the popular social networking site. Advocacy groups and candidates — from President Barack Obama to Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer — have asked supporters to “donate” their Facebook profile pictures or status updates. The idea is to use supporters, and potentially their extensive networks of Facebook friends to spread a campaign message or simply remind friends to vote. Fulop’s people asked supporters to “tag” friends to a vote-reminder graphic on Facebook (seen at right) the Monday before the Wednesday BOE election.

“We just bombarded social media [telling them], ‘These are the people you’re supposed to vote for,’” Osborne says. While we saw several users complain of being spammed by the tagging, if it successfully reminded users that an election was happening — which seems likely — it could be considered a success.

Only around 370 people like Fulop on Facebook, and Osborne says she is working to grow that number (Fulop’s personal Facebook profile features much more interaction and public comment than his Public Figure page). He also has around 880 followers on Twitter. Meanwhile, Mayor Jerramiah Healy does not appear to have an active official Facebook or Twitter account, just a ghost account from 2009′s campaign on Twitter, and a personal profile and neglected public page on Facebook. Meanwhile, other political groups, like Dan Levin’s One Jersey City, maintain a presence on each platform even when there’s no election; One Jersey City’s Facebook group has 319 members, and it is followed by 191 users on Twitter.

Fulop plans to bolster his online video efforts, too, says Osborne, noting that he’ll respond to questions from voters via videos posted on Facebook. The trend toward incorporating video both for campaigning and to update constituents is becoming more popular, particularly as people view more and more video on their mobile devices.

Could mobile organizing technology and digital channels like Facebook help Fulop in the 2013 race? If anything, Fulop could stand to benefit from harnessing activities already taking place in digital channels, especially if Healy and others ignore them. By constantly cultivating these areas years before the actual election, Fulop is poised to be far ahead of candidates who jump in the race and then build the digital infrastructure.

Photo of Fulop and BOE candidates Carol Harrison-Arnold, Sue Mack and Marvin Adames on election night by Steve Gold

But Jersey City is changing in many ways, as the Technological Society becomes more fully realized each and every day. So it’s only fitting that in this year’s campaign, we were treated to a high-tech version of the notorious sound truck: the truck for incumbent Mayor Jerramiah Healy blasting video advertisements (many featuring President Barack Obama). Yes, indeed, the nature of politicking in Chilltown is changing.

Meanwhile on the web, the past five years have birthed an interactive multiverse of social networking, content management, bleeding edge hardware, mobile web applications and the disappearing barriers between content creators, distributors and consumers. The difference is staggering. It has changed the face of everything it has touched, including politics, and those who ignore it face a major disadvantage when facing those who embrace it.

We saw just how far this new web can affect the outcome of an election during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The Obama campaign did what no one had done before: it embraced new technologies as a fundamental and integrated component of traditional campaign organizing and fundraising, rather than a sideshow. Technology was not just a tool in their toolbox, it was their drive train.

MyBarackObama.com allowed local organizers to plug in with the national campaign, taking the reigns on grassroots organizing while staying connected and relevant to the overall strategy. It also offered a suite of tools that allowed organizers to easily send out email blasts or coordinate with others. Twitter social messaging was used to get information out to people, but it was also used to focus organizers and engage supporters in an energizing and interactive way. Facebook groups were used to cement the youth vote in a way that had rarely been seen before. And now, this is the standard by which other campaigns are being judged.

Well, I might not go that far. The Obama campaign had one thing most campaigns only dream of having: Barack Obama. But lessons from the campaign could be learned by any candidate for any office.

So how did Jersey City’s mayoral and City Council candidates use these lessons and emerging web campaign technologies to bolster their bids for office this spring? With the hangover from the elections receding into the background and the runoff passed, we take a look at how well the campaigns integrated new technologies into their own strategies, and what impact that had on the outcome.

Team Healy

The website for incumbent Mayor Healy and his roster of City Council candidates was fairly simple and informative, with links to news, biographies, platforms and positions. The site’s page loading was slowed down by objects and images, but the content was easy to navigate.

The Team Healy site was also tied to the social web, with outgoing links to Facebook and YouTube pages.

The Healy campaign boasted two Facebook pages in addition to individual candidate’s pages. Healy For Mayor 2009 was the most active. A political organization page with 236 members, it dwarfed the nascent Young Professionals for Mayor Healy, another political organization page with only 27 members.

One Healy candidate, Ward C’s Nidia Rivera Lopez, had her Facebook page notably hacked in late April. Links to pornography were sent out to her 44 Facebook supporters. The fact that her account was compromised and porn sent out over it — during a campaign — is real slacking on her tech team’s part. What was the password on it, 1-2-3-4? (Remind me to change the password on my luggage.)

The Healy team had 13 videos on YouTube, including each campaign ad. They also put longer videos of high-profile Healy endorsements from Newark mayor Cory Booker and Sen. Bob Menendez on the page, as well as several clips used to bolster the messaging of Healy’s ties to Obama. The page is rounded out by clips from Healy’s most recent State of the City address and from the Sustainable Cities conference that took place at Liberty Science Center in March. Of course, the campaign was also shadowed on YouTube by the user “JerryHealy09” which posted a parody ad that apes a Hillary Clinton ad from the Democratic presidential primaries and plays on Healy’s reputation as one with a wee bit of a thirst.

The Healy campaign was one of only two that waded into the Twitter waters this election. Both Healy and Lopez had Twitter accounts, but judging from the number and dates of their updates, it was little more than a passing fad.

@MayorHealy, with only five updates over its apparent lifespan of ten days (May 6-16), still amassed 67 followers; while @NidiaRLopez sent out 13 updates (the last one on election night) and picked up 24 followers. Her use of Twitter seemed more organic than Healy’s, but only slightly (mainly because of this May 7 tweet: “Doing an oral hygiene presentation at the Grandview Senior Center.”). Overall, both accounts feel a bit cold and spammy.

Both Healy and Lopez seem not to have learned one of the basic tenets of Twitter marketing, whether political or not: If you follow people, they will be more likely to follow you back. Healy was only following eight other Twitter users, while Lopez was following six.

Manzo for Jersey City

The website for Lou Manzo and his team of council candidates had a solid amount of information, but it was hampered in load time by too many images and embedded videos all on the home page. It also featured a strange site architecture that tells us it most likely wasn’t set up by a web expert.

The Manzo campaign had videos, but used the relatively obscure service Blip.tv rather than YouTube or Vimeo. The campaign’s Blip page featured several Manzo ads and longer-form segments where he spoke about issues. Manzo’s campaign was largely absent from Facebook and Twitter, even though Manzo did maintain a personal Facebook page, which he used for campaign messaging on occasion.

Smith Team for Positive Change

In the beginning stages of the campaign, the slate headed by Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith had a remedial website that was tough to navigate and sported poorly cropped headshots of Smith’s council candidates.

Smith’s web strategy didn’t really get going until its relatively late-in-the-game hiring of longtime local journalist David Cruz as communications director. One of Cruz’s first tasks was to set up a new website.

The site Cruz went with — which unfortunately can no longer be retrieved online — felt more like a blog than a traditional campaign site, with each candidate “contributing” entries and first-person accounts of life on the trail. The site also included the relevant links to biographical, policy and background information. It also included a schedule of upcoming events, debates and campaign appearances.

One of the Smith team’s other web strengths was the use of YouTube video, both on the YouTube site and embedded in the Smith site. This is not surprising considering Cruz’s recent experience in radio. He took the skills honed at Newark’s WBGO and turned them into campaign videos that, while not slick by any means, were effective in other ways.

The two campaign ads were obvious candidates for the YouTube page. But the nine longer clips, of candidates out campaigning and sometimes talking off the cuff about various issues, were the real diamond in the rough here. They were entertaining (at least to a political wonk!), touched on policy (always a plus) and revealed more about the real person behind the candidate than any campaign ad did this season.

One Jersey City

For a campaign with very little money, the One Jersey City team, led by mayoral candidate Dan Levin, made good use of the web and social media.

The campaign’s main site featured a traditional layout, but at times was hard to navigate and was slow to load. The site also suffered from a few false starts.

In the nascent stages of the campaign, the One Jersey City team was using its site to illustrate one of its main campaign themes: using programs and policies that have worked in other places to help solve the problems facing Jersey City. To that end, the site briefly began uploading policy papers, research and related news articles about issues like community policing. It was a strategy that merged well with the web, with its endless interconnectivity and borderless geography. But unfortunately as the campaign heated up, the campaign (understandably) had little time to do such rudimentary blogging.

A similar phenomenon took place with the campaign’s use of short web videos designed to illustrate a problem in the city and the solution that the campaign was offering. Billed as a series, the last video was teased on the blog in February, and they ended up only touching on land use and zoning issues — important issues, no doubt, but not exactly the “hot” issues in the campaign.

On Facebook, One Jersey City was disproportionately well-represented, when compared to the overall vote total it received. Its One Jersey City common interest group sports 222 members, with a more active “Wall” than most of the other campaigns and a variety of on-the-scenes photos and messages from Levin. The group is still active as of this writing, which is fitting since Levin has said the campaign was only the beginning for One Jersey City.

For a low-budget grassroots campaign, One Jersey City was lookin’ good on video, thanks to help from Jersey City’s own Colin Comstock of Le Arsenal AV. The campaign was the only one to go with Vimeo in addition to YouTube, and they’ve got 15 videos on their Vimeo page, including the one campaign ad they produced, those short issues videos we mentioned above and solid footage from campaign events and from public hearings where Levin spoke.

Phil Webb

The website of mayoral candidate Phil Webb was by far the least technologically advanced, and also hardly included any relevant information about the candidate. Webb’s site was an out of the box solution from CompleteCampaigns.com, and while it is not a bad idea to go with such a product (especially if money is an issue, as it was for Webb), if you do, you should modify it to make sure — at the very least — that the majority of links aren’t empty pages.

Webb did do some ingenious advertising on Craigslist, as proven by the ad that read: “MAY 12, 2009 IS THE ELECTION. PLEASE GO TO YOU TUBE.COM AND TYPE IN PHIL WEBB NET, TO VIEW HIS COMMERCIAL…. THANK YOU AND PLEASE PASS THE WORD…”

Doing so takes you to Phil Webb’s YouTube presence, which is poorly branded (the video is actually part of Champagne Films’ page, not a dedicated Webb page) — but at least he got something up there.

Steven Fulop

Independent Ward E candidate Steven Fulop’s web strategy rivaled Team Healy’s for its sophistication and bested all the other campaigns for its use of emerging web tools and technologies (perhaps no surprise since the councilman is an avid iPhone user).

His main site was contemporary in design, with a Flash banner headline and various multimedia elements prominently displayed. The navigation was clear, the content was easy to find and the site loaded relatively quickly.

The Fulop campaign was the clear leader on Facebook, with three different pages, in addition to his personal page.

The largest page was the Councilman Steven Fulop common interest group, which as of this writing boasts 449 members and an active “Wall.” The older Steven Fulop 2009 common interest group has 36 members, while the related Fulop Commitment profile page has 45 friends.

Despite placing no traditional video advertising on local cable, the Fulop campaign did produce web videos and hosted them on their YouTube page. Most of them feature Fulop speaking on issues at events, with the exception of the one post-election video — a slick “thank you” video shot on election night.

The Fulop campaign was the only one besides the Healy campaign to use Twitter, and was a very active tweeter during the campaign. He’s since discontinued one of the Twitter accounts and now lives @StevenFulop. His Twitter page, which he still updates, is worth following for random bits of insight into City Council and Council Caucus meetings (June 1, 6:16 pm: “Gaughan is mad…. Vega not so much”).

From Bits to Ballots

If there is one thing that cannot be stressed enough, it is that the best new media strategy will never change a fundamental fact of politics: if you can’t get out the vote, you won’t win the election. This year’s elections were determined by about 20 percent of the city’s registered voters, and the votes broke overwhelmingly for Mayor Healy’s slate in every ward, with the exception of Fulop’s runaway win in Ward E.

Only part of this can be ascribed to voter apathy. Getting out the vote was essential to Healy’s opponents, but the votes never materialized. While traditional get out the vote efforts often require massive investment in campaign organization, funds which Healy’s opponents simply did not have, they can be overcome by an influx of motivated, coordinated volunteers.

One of the major benefits of new media is the relatively low cost of entry to a campaign. All the tools available are free, like most of the web, requiring only an investment of talent and careful planning. With said talent and planning, new media can be a great leveling device, especially in local elections, helping to mitigate organizational or fundraising difficulties. But while this year’s election was well ahead of the last election with regard to use of new media and social networks, it was still light years behind the kind of integrated use present in many innovative national campaigns, and far below their potential. This is part of what kept the big-fundraising incumbents in office.

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

• Focus on search engine optimization for your sites, to improve search results for your content.
• Manage social networks effectively, interactively and in relation to on-the-ground organizing.
• Empower and involve your supporters in online communities so that they not only vote themselves, but encourage friends to vote as well on election day (bring a friend to the polls).
• Optimize and maximize online fundraising, stressing easy-to-give small, recurring donations in a secure online environment that is one click away.
• Let your supporters carry your message themselves, through their own projects. Make these satellite projects accessible and give people access to online tools that will help them do this.
• Engage the mobile web via Twitter and SMS text messaging.
• Get your organizers connected. Get them smartphones. Get them workshops.
• However: Realize there is no such thing as a social media expert.

Additional reporting by Jon Whiten.