John Edwards and Peanut Butter
Jose Antonio Vargas from the Post has a good article up about the John Edwards campaign’s presence on a mind numbing 24 social networking sites. The experts quoted in the article are all complimentary of Edwards’ efforts in the social media space. I think the story is missing one thing: a strong statement of dissent.
So let me repeat that I think 24 is way too many sites for a campaign to maintain a presence on. I don’t think it is good strategy.
The whole thing takes me back to the peanut butter mainifesto written by Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse in response to his own company’s meandering stategy.
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
I hate peanut butter. We all should.
Yup.
See also:
- JohnEdwards.com Is a Mess by Patrick Ruffini
- John Edwards NOT Social Networking for ‘User Generated Politics’ campaign 2008 by Dona Bogatin from ZDNet
Another Twitter Political First
I’m pretty sure John Edwards was the first politican to start a Twitter account. But as far as I know the UK’s Alan Johnson is the first to actually integrate a Twitter account into a campaign website. A nice job by Johnson’s communications director Stuart Bruce.
Should Candidates Use Social Networks?
Kevin Anderson of the Guardian has a good post up about the McCain MySpace “hack” specifically and the use of social networks by campaigns more generally. He sums up what I’ve been trying to get at this week with my Digg and McCain posts.
Anderson writes about candidate presences on social networks:
It’s pretty easy to see through these cheap ploys, and they feel disingenuous. Setting up a static page on a social networking site actually makes it look even more static, not at all interactive. Just by being in MySpace, or having a Twitter feed or putting the odd video up on YouTube doesn’t make a media organisation more interactive if you don’t actually interact.
Publishing on an interactive platform is still just publishing. What happens when people ask your ‘content’ questions, and there isn’t a human being there to answer? Well, at the very least, nothing happens. People get bored and go away. But, sometimes bad things happen, especially when you’re not particularly clueful with your approach and don’t understand the space. If you want community and participation, be ready to participate.
Exactly. If you are going to do it, do it right. If you aren’t truly committed to it, stay away.
Free Papers on the Web
After my post about the Washington Post Express' website, I decided to do some more research and see what other free newspapers are doing online. I compiled a list of free papers in the US and checked out their websites, using some of the same criteria as I did in our newspaper study. The object of this was to see if free papers are outperforming their paid-for companions on the Web.
Link Roundup 3/29/2007
(1) Redefining The IMG Tag from TechCrunch
“This morning, AdBrite launches BritePic to help people add a lot of new functionality around embedded images. Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features. And an advertisement, if they choose to.” Very cool.
(2) Online news design – awful or brilliant? from Design 2.0
Article shows screenshots of the website of large newspapers around the world. Interesting to compare.
(3) Washington Post redesign to focus on video from MarketWatch
The Post redesigns their homepage. Pretty subtle changes in my opinion – I had study a bit to notice the changes. My biggest problem with the Post site has always been that I don’t ever feel like I can find anything. This doesn’t fix that.