So much for Southern hospitality. On Tuesday, a group of “open-minded” liberals once again proved the oxymoron by completely disrupting an attempted speech by former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo on whether illegal aliens should be granted in-state tuition. As the former Representative tried to address the audience at UNC, students in the hall and outside the building shouted profanity, erupted into riot, and broke a window of the classroom where the Congressman was speaking. The event became so out of control that university police were forced to use pepper spray and threaten the students with taser guns.(You can see a video here).

No doubt these enlightened students are hiding behind the First Amendment, claiming they had a right to speak and protest. However their right to free speech and protest should not include the right to endanger the life of a speaker or completely derail a public event. Had they calmed their clever shouting of “there’s no debate, stop the hate” and stopped to listen to the Congressman, they might have learned how the DREAM Act would directly and negatively impact themselves and their successors. They might have learned that the DREAM Act would place American citizens in direct competition with illegal aliens for scarce slots in freshman classes at state colleges, while awarding the illegal alien students with undeserved amnesty. They might have learned that the number of seats at a university is fixed and for every admitted illegal alien, an American citizen and state resident would lose their place at the university. They might have been encouraged to ask why themselves why students from South Carolina should have to pay out-of-state tuition to attend the University of North Carolina, while students from Mexico should not.

They might have been asked to have an open mind and listen to a differing viewpoint. But they didn’t learn any of this. Because they refused to listen. Instead they made national news for behaving like spoiled children who do not understand that the greatness of this country is threatened by illegal immigration. Instead, they embarrassed their school, their state, and everyone in our age group.

These students, who undoubtedly pride themselves on their “open-minded” and “tolerant” worldviews, deserve more than a simple Honor Court hearing. Disciplinary action should be taken against them. Additionally, the University should make drastic efforts to ensure that “diversity education” on the nation’s oldest campus encompasses freedom of ideological thought and political opinion. The Chancellor should be embarrassed and the school humbled by what happened Tuesday night. I’m embarrassed for them.

1. Branding- The logo you use on your Facebook page should be a professional representation of your organization. This means at minimum it should be the correct size. I can’t stress this enough: please make sure your Facebook logo fits completely in the space allocated. It’s also helpful to use square logos to ensure the logo’s integrity when Facebook automatically resizes it for the status bar. I’m not going to call anyone out, but if your Conservative organization fits this description, go fix it! We’re trying to stage a revolution here.

2. Facebook Ads- Use them. Facebook Ads drive traffic to your page by allowing you to target potential audiences. The key to a successful Facebook Page (and any website) is good traffic and Facebook Ads provide the beginning traffic for your Page. Unless you have a national base and a thriving Twitter account, you may find it hard to break the 100 fans barrier without a targeted ad campaign. Every organization is different, but my recommendation is to run an ad or two until you reach a pre-determined number then suspend the ad campaign and monitor your organizations’ viral growth. After a certain point, you should find you don’t need ads any longer.

3. Use the Wall- The “wall” is the front section of your Facebook Page. When visitors come to your site this is the first thing they will see and, in many cases, the only section of your Page they will look at. This means it is your goal to have the most relevant information on the wall, including your website address and Twitter name. When you post a note or ad a video, these activities will show up on your wall, but will eventually rotate out. If it’s important, post it again and again.

4. Be Engaged- Facebook Pages are now dynamic, meaning they come with dates and timestamps for every new addition your organization makes to the Page. This is both good and bad. If you are frequently using your Facebook Page and engaging your audience, then these timestamps will be of tremendous help to you because they will make you look relevant and interesting to potential fans. However, if you built a Facebook Page with no intention of ever updating it, every visitor to your Page will immediately know this and will be less likely to join. Status line updates are an easy way to fix this problem without creating a lot of work for staff members. (See number 5).

5. Status Messages- Your mission as a non-profit is to educate your fans, and status line updates are a great way to do that. These messages will show up in the News Feed on your fans’ home pages, meaning they will see the short status messages without ever even visiting your site. Use the updates a few times a week to link to a news story that you think is important, ask for feedback or opinions, or generate discussion about another project you are working on. The more engaged your fans are with your Facebook Page, the more successful your Facebook presence will be and the more likely future fans will be to join your Page.

6. Know Your Audience- And what interests them. This gets to the heart of “why did someone become a fan of your page?” For example, if your organization deals only with abortion, then you can assume that your fans are at least a little interested in that topic. However, if your organization encompasses many different topics, then it might be a little harder to find out what people really care about. A great way to find out which articles or tidbits of information are most interesting to your audience is to monitor which issues generate the most response on your Facebook wall. Of course you’ll want to provide more information on a wider range of topics, but it will be helpful to know your key issues to generate good discussion on a regular basis, making your page look active and engaging!

There’s more to having a good Facebook Page, but these things are, in my opinion, the most important. If you are a conservative organization and you need help with your Facebook Page, leave a comment on this blog or DM me @jessicanance.

While millions of Facebook users are bemoaning the new Twitter-like feature on Facebook, conservative non-profits should be elated with this new change.  In its quest to compete with Twitter, Facebook has solved the conservative non-profits number one problem: generating return traffic to pages.  In fact, just a few days before the new Facebook launched, I began drafting a post for this site entitled “If You Build It, They Probably Won’t Remember It’s There.”  The premise of this article being that conservative non-profits would get more bang for their buck on sites such as Twitter, Ning, and WordPress because of the ease in directly communicating updates to fans without cluttering their Facebook pages.

Fortunately, the morning I went to post that article, I happened to check a client’s Facebook page first. And what did I find?  Not only have Facebook pages morphed into Facebook profiles, but pages now operate as part of the news feed. This is great news for conservative non-profits aiming to reach the Facebook demographic as it not only enables Twitter-like updates (and even syncs with your Twitter account), but also allows pages to generate discussions among their fan base that will show up on your fans front page news feed.

I’ll have more tips later in the week for how to use the new site, but for now, if you have a conservative group or non-profit and no Facebook page, go set one up! If you need tips or have questions, leave a comment indicating as much and I’ll try to help out.

I received an e-mail about two weeks ago entitled, “What Have We Learned in 2,063 years?” This quote was the body of the e-mail:

“The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall” – Cicero, 55 B.C. (Author’s note: this quote has been changed to reflect exact wording)

Following the quote, the e-mail read, “Nothing. We have learned nothing in 2,063 years.”

I knew when I read the e-mail I’d have to highlight it in a blog of some fashion (it was way too long to tweet), but I didn’t know when until I saw this headline on Politico Monday: “National Debt Hits Record 11 Trillion.” I don’t claim to be a scholar on Roman history or an expert on modern government and economic theory, but common sense tells me that there is no nation in the world that could survive the destructive borrowing, spending, and printing path we are on. When we see these headlines about more and more spending, I can’t help but think that maybe this e-mail is true- maybe we have learned nothing.

Balancing the budget, living within our means, making sound decisions- these aren’t partisan issues or issues that cater to the rich or poor or black or white. These are the very decisions that will guarantee that our democratic experiment succeeds. Balancing the budget won’t be easy. Paying our national debt and further trimming our welfare rolls will take years of committed and pragmatic leadership in Washington. It will require more revenue and serious program cuts. The government payrolls will have to be cut and entire departments stand to be eliminated (my vote is we start with the Department of Education, follow it up with the Department of Homeland Security, and then for fun eliminate all the czars we’ve recently acquired). These are difficult decisions we cannot afford to ignore.

Fortunately for us, there is still time to correct the course we are on. Unfortunately for us, these are the very decisions Washington would rather ignore. I think Cicero would tell us that America does not have to persist. The world will go on without us.

This article is cross-posted at The Jacksonian.

Google Goes All A-Twitter

Top 4 New Facebook Page Features Businesses Will Love

Both of these are interesting and worth reading, but I will say I’m not as excited about the new FB Page layout as the guys at hubspot.com are. The newsfeed set up on FB may harm some conservative non-profits that aren’t updating their pages frequently.  I’ll address this more next week.

Happy Friday, y’all!

Let’s start this discussion on healthcare by recognizing that most reasonable people would like for their neighbors to have healthcare- good healthcare at that- and that conservative and libertarian opposition to single-payer healthcare is not a symptom of our being mean, hateful, racist, uncaring, or any other ridiculous accusation the left might use to shut down rational debate.

Now that we have established these simple facts, let’s address the question that is central in this debate: is it the role of the federal government to provide healthcare to citizens? Well the answer to this seems pretty easy. The last time I read my pocket Constitution, I didn’t see anything about a right to healthcare. (I did read something about the right to bear arms, but we’ll save that for another post). Because the Constitution mentions nothing about government-provided healthcare, the answer to that question was a pretty easy no. However, for sake of this post being a little longer, we’ll humor the left a bit more and pretend the answer is maybe.

Assuming the answer is maybe, the next logical question is, do you want the federal government providing your healthcare? To answer that question, let’s answer two others first:

(1) If you can’t afford your own healthcare, what makes you think the federal government can?

(2) Do you really want the same people who created the DMV and run the VA to make decisions about your healthcare?

I’ve seen six year olds play monopoly with more fiscal responsibility than the federal government has shown in the last few decades. How, then, could it be possible that the same government who landed us over ten trillion dollars in debt, could afford to provide universal care? The fact is the government simply cannot afford healthcare for the entire country, which is where rationing would come in. Essentially, the government, as the single-payer of your healthcare costs, would be responsible for deciding whether your grandfather gets to have a liver transplant or your mother gets treatment for her Diabetes. As Tom Daschle wrote, “Doctors and patients might resent any encroachment on their ability to choose certain treatments.” (HT: Heritage Morning Bell) I think if the time comes that the federal government is dictating whether my father, who is a cancer survivor, can have the preventative surgery he needs, resentment will be putting it very mildly.

As for the road question, I don’t know about you, but where I’m from we’ve been waiting for the state to pave our road for a long time now. Run-ins with the federal government are rarely pleasant unless you really like standing in line and filling out mountains of paperwork. Let’s look at a more relevant example of government-sponsored healthcare. My grandfather fought proudly for America in the Korean War, and, as a result of his Air Force service, his hearing was severely damaged. Last year, when he was tired of being unable to hear, he turned to the VA. That was May of 2008. It is now March of 2009 and we are still filling out the paperwork because everything we send in is “processed” for 5 weeks then followed by yet more paperwork. Fortunately, my grandfather’s disability is not life threatening. Unfortunately, this story is one that many of our veterans could also tell.

Taking that example, imagine if every person in America had to go to visit their local healthcare bureaucracy to get permission for a surgery or to be reimbursed by the federal government for their yearly checkup. If I had to go through what my grandfather has each time I had to go to the doctor, I’d be a lot less likely to get a yearly physical or even elective surgery. And, since I’m fairly sure I’m not alone on this, it seems logical that a government-sponsored system would result in a lot more people not receiving the care they need.

So to answer the question: do you want the federal government to provide healthcare to everyone? For me, the answer is an obvious no. I’m not against single-payer healthcare because I don’t want everyone to have healthcare. I’m against nationalized healthcare because I honestly believe that far fewer people will receive the care they need.

By the way, I’m still looking for my invitation to the healthcare summit. Maybe Obama has chosen me for his summit on protecting the 2^nd Amendment instead?

This post is crossposted at andrewjacksondem.com.

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with each of my online social networking accounts- and this is my full time job! That’s how I know y’all must either be exhausted or Twittering in your sleep.

I think the enthusiasm from the conservative base is electrifying right now, but I’m worried that overload (and the inability to remember yet another password) is going to discourage people from becoming active participants. Why participate in your county GOP chapter if you are still trying to read every article you saw linked on Twitter today?

This social network overload also presents a serious problem for the providers of conservative information: candidates, think tanks, PACs, etc. With limited staff and time, how could a local think tank possibly create 10 different accounts and maximize their engagement on each site? Maybe an even better question is, “should a think tank create multiple accounts?” The answer is no- mostly.

For the Conservative movement in general, I hope that we will see a gradual trend of one or two networks becoming the central platforms for the conservative message. My vote is for Twitter and Ning because of the ability to engage activists and connect them with each other. The barrier to entry for each of these is also lower, which means more demographics will feel comfortable engaging with these communities. As a fellow NC Tweeter told me today: “Dads on Facebook seem like stalkers.” Well, with a little hard work, dads on Ning should feel like responsible, engaged conservatives!

Over the next few posts I will look at the pros and cons of the three main formats (Facebook, Twitter, and Ning) and discuss how conservatives should be using each of these.

(This series is really intended to generate discussion, so comments are welcomed and encouraged.)

If only Sen. McCain had set up his Facebook Page a little earlier, he’d be Twittering from the Oval Office right now…

Okay, you’re right. McCain probably needed a lot more than a good social media campaign to be number 44, but it wouldn’t have hurt. Since the GOP came to the conclusion that the party was beginning to live up to it’s name, leading Republicans and conservative activists have seized new media. Some of these results have been encouraging and a breath of fresh air to us “20-something, previously embarrassed to be associated with the RNC” Republicans. Unfortunately, some of these efforts have fallen very, very flat. Fortunately for every conservative, many of these campaigns can be fixed with small tweaks and little effort.

I’m really excited to be part of the effort to rebuild, reinvigorate, and reconnect the Conservative majority in both North Carolina and across the nation. I believe very strongly that social networking and new media will be the avenue for this revolution, but only if we learn to use it correctly.

I started Red, Right, and New to address the fantastic, the mediocre, and the please-don’t-do-that-again attempts Conservatives are making to rebuild the party in the hopes that when the Web 3.0 train leaves the station, the Grand Old Party will be driving it.