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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

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.

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.

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. 

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(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.

I got an email from my friend Chuck this morning pointing me to the recent overhaul of the print edition of my hometown paper, the San Antonio Express News. 

The Express-News writes about the redesign:

It's hardly breaking news: We're all awash in a flood of information, coming from an ever-growing number of sources.  We know our readers are more informed, more wired – and yes, much more busy taking it all in. 

So it's time that the Express-News front page reflect that reality.  Change comes today with a new format designed around two key goals.  First, we are providing readers with a larger menu of items, allowing the front page to be a better window into the rest of the paper.  Second, we're doing more to emphasize and develop our best story of the day, focusing as much as possible on local news you won't find anywhere else. 

Sounds good.  A couple of points here: (more…)

Techcrunch has the story of the hacking of John McCain's MySpace page by a designer unhappy with the way McCain's campaign used a MySpace template he designed.  Here's the scoop from Techcrunch:

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by NewsVine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:

"Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females."

As of this writing the prank message is still up.

This is another example of the point I made in my last post: if campaigns are going to play in these social communities they need to understand the rules and respect the culture.

Update: Here is a link to a screenshot of the defaced McCain MySpace page.  It has been fixed.

Update 2: David All points out a post by the designer who performed the mischief. 

My post about the use of Digg by Ron Paul activists attracted a strong response from Ron Paul supporters.  In comments on Digg and to my post, many folks acknowledged that they signed up for Digg specifically to submit and digg stories about Ron Paul. 

This was already pretty obvious.  If you click through on the profile of many users you'll see that all activity centers around Ron Paul.  Other users inject Paul-related content into unrelated discussion threads.  These folks are pretty clearly using Digg specifically to promote Ron Paul.

I don't think there is anything innately wrong with that.  But I don't think it is going to be effective in the long run and may in fact be counterproductive. (more…)