On the DNC’s Party Builder

Yesterday the Democratic National Committee launched Party Builder, a social networking tool attached to their main website, www.democrats.org. This comes on the heels of a similar effort the Republican National Committee launched a while ago called MyGOP.

Party Builder is a nice, full featured tool. The folks behind this did a good job. It just raises two questions for me:

(1) Do people really want to do full on social networking on a website hosted by a political party? I’m not convinced they do.

(2) Is it really a good idea to build a proprietary social networking tool like this when there are so many other options? Inevitably, the DNC effort is going to be clunky when compared to tools like Friendster, Facebook and MySpace. They don’t have the resources to compete with commercial ventures in this space. Maybe a better path would be to partner with existing social networking sites and/or to build add ons (widgets) people can attach to their profiles. Go to where the people already are instead of trying to bring them to you two months before the election.

A screenshot of the dashboard after the jump. Continue reading “On the DNC’s Party Builder” »

Network News Site: The Good News and Bad News

Our recent discussions about the national and international newspaper industry got me thinking: I wonder how network news sites measure up? Are the sites of some of the United States’ most popular news networks better or worse than those of their print competitors?

Continue reading “Network News Site: The Good News and Bad News” »

Los Angeles Times Newspoint: Decent Idea, Poor Execution

The Los Angeles Times recently launched a branded RSS reader called Newspoint. The idea here is to introduce RSS to the masses by providing users with a simple tool they can install on their machines and start using RSS even if they don’t really know what it is. Conveniently, once installed the reader automatically subscribes you to seemingly all of LA Times’ various feeds.

This is not a bad idea. Its potentially a really great idea if executed well. The problem I have is that the Newspoint RSS reader is sort of terrible. Here is a breakdown of the major issues I had with it:

(1) Newspoint only shows you article headlines. So partial and full text RSS feeds are turned into headline only feeds by Newspoint. The goal here is clearly to drive clicks to the LA Times website so they can serve more ads. It doesn’t make for a good feed reading experience, as your constantly going back and forth between Newspoint and your browser when trying to read stories. It’s clunky. Continue reading “Los Angeles Times Newspoint: Decent Idea, Poor Execution” »

On Mark Warner and Second Life

There has been some buzz on the blogs about former VA Governor (and future Democratic Presidential candidate) Mark’s Warner’s appearance in the virtual world Second Life. A transcript of the apearance can be read here.

The last year has seen more and more marketers and PR folks experimenting with Second LIfe. The hype is pretty breathless. So it was only a matter of time before some big name politicians jumped on the trend. Given the mostly positive coverage, I figured I’d take a look at this from a more critical perspective. Here are my thoughts:

(1) It was a great idea for Warner to give this a try. He is the first big name to dive in and the blog pickups he has gotten alone make it worth the effort. Congrats to his team.

(2) Second Life doesnt’ yet have the critical mass of users needed for these virtual townhalls to be effective beyond the PR stunt value. Second Life currently has 610,000 subscribers. Most Americans haven’t heard of it and would have no idea how to participate. The fact is in person appearances, telephone-based townhall meetings and even online chats are more effective ways to actually have discussions with voters. Those formats are actually accessible and don’t require you to register with and master Second Life.

The first few politicians that dive in will get press and brand themselves as people who “get it” in terms of what is happenning on the web. That is probably all they are really looking for anyway. But after the dust clears I’m skeptical of the real value of these superficial, drop in appearances by politicians.

(3) The content of the appearance wasn’t compelling. Warner was asked some softballs and answered them the way you would expect, saying very little. I think “getting it” online has less to do with using the latest toys than it does talking to people in a real way. Have a conversation and act like a real live human being. It will be interesting to see how things go in the next appearance when Warner promises to take questions from actual people (this first appearance was simply an interview with a moderator).

As John Edwards said at his appearance at Gnomedex:

I’m trying to retrain and recondition myself when I get asked a question to actually answer it — to not say what I’ve been trained to say, to not say what’s careful and cautious.

Giving your stump speech on Second Life isn’t going to do you much good. Just like publishing your stump speech as a blog entry isn’t going to do much good. With all this “new media” stuff, to be effective you’ve got to embrace the spirit of it in addition to mastering the technical details. Just showing up isn’t going to be enough in the long run.

Update: Here is a link to a video clip of the appearance. Like I said, not super compelling.

Some Things I Learned About Our Blog (and Blogs in General) from Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a pretty cool tool that allows you to see visually how people are using your website (what page elements they are clickign one). Read a full review of Crazy Egg on Techcrunch here.

Seeing as how we build websites for a living, we implemented it on our blog homepage as a way of giving it a test drive. Here’s what we learned:

(1) No one cares about our sidebar. Like a lot of bloggers, we like to screw around with WordPress plugins and widgets. We should probably stop since it appears no one uses them. Out of around 500 visitors during the test period:

• 1 clicked on a Most Popular post
• 1 clicked on a single month in our archive
• 1 clicked on one of the sites listed on our blogroll (congrats Media Shift)
• 0 clicked on our tag cloud deal

People did use our search and our RSS feed attracted some clicks. But I think we need to realize that the sidebar toys are for the blogger and not the readers. Or it could be that our plugins are just lame. One of those.

I’d be interested if other bloggers have plugins/widgets that actually attract clicks.

(2) People read the comments. Five of the nine most clicked on links on our homepage were to comments on our posts. For folks trying to make money on their blog or website, the lesson here is that allowing (and attracting) comments increases page views.

(3) We should take the Home link off our blog homepage. Sort of stupid to have that link there to begin with since people are already on the homepage and all. Eight people clicked on it, probably expecting something other than for the page they are on to reload. I suspect they were looking for our company homepage and weren’t clear on how to get there. We’ll have to play with this.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff and have a website, give Crazy Egg a try.