The “Are Republicans Behind Online?” conversation produced another handful of posts today. David All started things back up with a column in the Politico. Mike Turk weighed in and then weighed in again with the thinking behind shutting down the RNC’s Team Leader program (which I helped build). Patrick Ruffini put in his two cents as did James Joyner (who coincidentally I watched on a panel today in LA.)

I think this topic is pretty well surrounded but have one miniscule point to make.

I don’t think social networking works at the national committee level.

The DNC’s Party Builder social networking platform uses the same software as Barack Obama’s successful My Barack Obama program. The RNC’s My GOP program has much more limited functionality and doesn’t allow users to create their own content on GOP.com.

Here is a graph from Compete.com that shows trends in traffic to Democrats.org and GOP.com.

Shouldn’t the DNC site be way ahead of the RNC given that they have the more open social networking tool? Shouldn’t all that user generated content/networking be driving tons of traffic? I have no doubt Party Builder has been a moderate success but it certainly hasn’t been a game changer. The tool has been much more successful on the Obama site. Why?

I just don’t think people want to socialize all that much on a Committee site. The largely negative content produced by both the RNC and DNC just doesn’t create a vibe where you want to kick up your heels and hang out. Right tool, wrong venue. With benefit of hindsight, I think this stuff works better if employed by individual candidates and/or activists with passionate voices.

What do you think?

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