
Twitter experienced another milestone last week, although you may not have noticed: Tweet for Chuck, a fundraising drive organized by the nascent campaign of Chuck DeVore, a California state assemblyman who is gearing up to take on Barbara Boxer in 2010. As far as I can discern, this is the first time Twitter has been put to this use.
Although it’s very early yet in the cycle, the last few weeks have seen a big jump in use of Twitter by conservatives, if the just-launched TCOT website (aggregating and ranking conservative tweeters) is any measure. The move should give DeVore some degree of online cred and visibility that few candidates yet have — at least among conservatives, and at this stage they matter most.
The image below, from the front page of the website, explains how it works better than any summary I could offer:

Further down the page, donors are listed along with their Twitter profile picture, the amount they donated or pledged, and whether other donors had listed them as a referrer:

By tweeting the donation to one’s Twitter followers, the campaign gets a free one-time use of that donor’s account and the chance to solicit additional donors. The same network effects that made Twitter even more conducive to passing along news about the Mumbai terror attacks than perhaps even the blogosphere could end up producing a tool more effective for fundraising than blogging as well.
Twitter is a more intimate experience than blogging, so a candidate on Twitter (as DeVore is) can to some extent simulate the access donors frequently get at traditional fundraising dinners. A candidate couldn’t really be expected to write a whole blog post thanking specific donors, but a tweet is just the right vehicle for such acknowledgment, and DeVore’s campaign has been doing just that.
Moreover, DeVore is on the right track so far, working with blogosphere and political veterans Josh Trevino and then Justin Hart and even contributing blog posts at the recently-launched GOP state blog network Red County.
It’s been said before that political movements tend to innovate in fundraising and message delivery when they’re out of power. With Barack Obama’s Twitter account recently falling silent while DeVore is taking it in a new direction, we might just be seeing that happen already.
Update: Don’t miss DeVore’s comment on this post.

More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the 




It’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed 










