By Bryan Buchan | @bryanbuchan.com

Thanks to twitter, about a week ago I received a tweet from one of my followers that mentioned a U-STREAM broadcast was about to begin. It was a RNC New Media Conference at the Capitol Club on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Being a New Media/Social Media guru and a progressive democrat, lets just say this was HIGHLY interesting for me to come across, I immediately clicked on the link and listened in.

I listened on and off for about 2 hours, both before their lunch break, (and mine), and afterward. And there seemed to be a constant theme…they are pissed off. It was PURE entertainment. What are they pissed off about?

1. Democrats demonized the republican message via social networking to the point where even they (RNC new media ‘experts’) admitted Dems were able to effectively label them as “Jerks”

2. Consistent complaints about their technology, most of all “Voter Vault”. Voter Vault from what I was to gather is the main database link that organizes grassroots efforts to connect with voters.

3. The mere volume and diversity of online activity and messaging was dismal from their grassroots compared to the Democrats.

The conference also addressed what they plan to do about this. In my opinion, the RNC would like to use new media as they have used AM Radio in the past. Saturate the market and get their message out. The question for us Dems, conservative and progressive alike is, are we going to let them? Several talking points discussed how they planned to move forward. Among which I picked up on a few when I listened in to the broadcast.

1. Integrate social networking API’s with their ‘Voter vault’ system.

2. Harness the mobile phone’s social networking components for on the ground field activities.

3. Capture democratic events, town hall meetings, press briefs, and even congress sessions, and immediately respond to them via social networks. An great example is the infamous Congressman John Culberson’s video that highlighted the power of viral internet video using Qik. Examples of his efforts seen here:

This last point needs to be made crystal clear to progressives everywhere. the RNC will use new media to capture and spin what the democrats say and do moving forward. Their New Media Conference was a starting point to a republican new media/social networking revolution.

What do progressive dems need to do? Well, according to the republican new media ‘experts’ we are already ahead of the game. Whether that is true, or not is not important. What is important is we expose the truth without the spin as we have done in the past. TRUTH TO POWER! We build upon the technologies that we have founded, we hold more workshops to teach young and old alike to embrace new internet technologies, we continue to blog our editorials and ‘vlog’ (video blog), our testimonials. Simply put the republicans will try to use the power of new media as they did AM Radio, will we let them?

Here is the link to the Republican New Media Conference that was captured using USTREAM, I highly recommend this video archive for anyone interested in this topic:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/republicannationalcommittee