The top stories of 2012 tell us that a candidate’s own voice is still the most important communication channel for any campaign to master. The consistently articulate candidate has a formidable tool to push back against negative messaging. For those candidates who can’t stay on message, don’t have a message or have that special talent for mangling the message, there is an inexhaustible supply of aspiring videographers looking for the next “gotcha” clip.

Now that you’ve seen what happens to experienced candidates with debate coaches and media handlers, you may want to think twice about your of-the-cuff remarks at the local diner. In the live-streaming media environment, public events and even many private moments are just a YouTube upload away from worldwide broadcast.

Read more from Steve Pearson and Ford O'Connell at Campaigns & Elections

A metric is a fancy way of asking what you want to count. The right metrics for your campaign are the ones that count activities that matter. Metrics that measure what you are doing are a good place to start. Metrics that measure what your supporters and potential voters are doing are even more valuable. Think of metrics like using a map. You’ll start out needing to know whether you are headed generally in the right direction, but ultimately you want to get to a specific point.

Your website is a two-way street. Think about what you want to measure before you even launch your website. You know what you want to say to visitors, but think about what they can tell you—about themselves, about their intensity for your issues, about their commitment to your campaign.

If you look to your website as a measuring tool, you can begin to think about how you’ll need to slice it up to capture data beyond just basic page view counts. Think of it as a survey, where your visitors tell you what questions they want you to answer and what problems they want you to solve through the links they click and the actions they take.

Read more from Steve Pearson and Ford O'Connell at Campaigns & Elections magazine 

When we look at a political website, we see reflections of the candidates and their campaigns. It’s nice to see campaigns that put some effort into dressing up for the occasion. But when we look deeper at how many campaigns use their websites and other online tools, the picture is often a lot less impressive.

Let’s take a look at whether you’ve built in the horsepower to rev up your campaign or you’re “all show and no go” online.

Our first checkpoint is to ask if you understand your audience and what you’re trying to accomplish online.  In the most simplistic terms, you’re looking at presenting information and encouraging action. On the information side, the rookie mistake is to confuse the ability to publish an unlimited amount of information on your website or Facebook info tab with the desire of the audience to wade through your magnum opus. Likewise, crowding your home page with an excessive number of action buttons and links makes them easy to find, but less likely that the important actions will stand out.

There is no hard and fast rule on the maximum number of words or links on a page, but if it takes a typical visitor minutes rather than seconds to figure out what it is you want to tell them or have them do, you deserve a “delay of campaign” penalty. If you don’t have a good sense of this yourself, we suggest you enlist the help of some friends with short attention spans. See if they read the entire page or if they click on the action items that are most important to you.

Read more from Steve Pearson and Ford O'Connell at Campaigns & Elections 

If you are the only candidate in your race, then you don’t really need to clearly articulate who you are and why you are running. For everyone else, however, this is a critical first step. If you can get this message down on paper in a concise statement, it makes everything that comes after—building your website, planning your advertising, designing brochures, fundraising and even your day-to-day operations—much easier to plan and execute.

There is another reason why it is important for you to sharpen the definition of your campaign. In 2012, there will be thousands of candidates running for office. Not all of them will be on the ballot with you, but all of these candidates compete for money, media coverage and voter attention. The guy running for U.S. Senate may not have any connection to your race for city council, but he is probably asking for money from your voters and he will be the person hogging the media spotlight.

With more and more blockbuster federal races reaching out across the country for financial support, you could very well find yourself competing with candidates from other states for campaign contributions and for the attention of activists.

For most of the media covering political campaigns, the attention starts at the top of the ticket and works its way down. In 2012, the professional journalists and top-tier bloggers will be focusing on the presidential race and a handful of campaigns for the House and Senate. Eventually, the media will work its way down the ticket and your race stands a chance of earning some coverage. But that’s not likely to happen for a while.

Read more from Steve Pearson and Ford O'Connell at Campaigns & Elections Magazine