Campaigns are Conversations

Posted on January 20th, 2007
By Todd Zeigler in Politics

Hillary Clinton formally announced her entry into the 2008 Presidential race today. And like Tom Vilsack, Senator Clinton appears to have spent some time with the Cluetrain Manifesto (”markets are conversations”).

The tagline “Let the Conversation Begin” is plastered all over her site and she begins her annoucement video with this quote: “I’m not just starting a campaign, I’m beginning a conversation.” I hope Cluetrain authors Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger are getting some royalties here.

The site itself is pretty good. I’m a big fan of the look and feel of the Clinton website, just like I was a big fan of the five or six Senatorial candidates who used pretty much this exact same design in 2006 (most are down or have been edited heavily, but you can see the similarities on Maria Cantwell’s site).

In terms of features, here are the things I found noteworthy:

  • As a way of facilitating the “conversation”, Clinton will be participating in live webcasts at 7:00 pm EST January 22-25. Seems like a good idea.
  • The site’s blog apparently isn’t ready yet, but Clinton is asking users to write posts on their own blogs sharing “your ideas on how we can work together for change.” I guess the Clinton campaign will pick the best entry and highlight that as their first blog post. This is sort of a clever idea. If it works, Clinton will get a bunch of bloggers writing lover letters to her on their own sites in an effort to win the contest. How viral. Not sure many political bloggers will take the bait though.
  • The site includes an online fundraising feature called Hillraisers. Basically, this functionality allows volunteers to run their own online fundraising campaigns. This is a great idea in theory (and great for bloggers/people with websites). But in reality if a friend of family member emailed asking me to give money to a political cause I literally could not delete the email fast enough.
  • Clinton’s site also features a party planning feature which allows users to plan their own Clinton-themed event. It is sort of interesting that no one is using Meetup.com anymore for stuff like this. It seems like every campaign I saw that did this last cycle had built their own event planning module.

Others on the announcement:

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Trackbacks/Pings

  1. Clinton is in, and blogging will play a crucial part in her campaign « Blog Campaigning
  2. Hillary Clinton Posts Question to Yahoo! Answers » The Bivings Report
  3. Everything is Miscellaneous » Blog Archive » Hillary’s conversational site — and why house parties are not MeetUps
  4. Patrick Ruffini :: Campaigns Aren’t Conversations
  5. Media SITREP

Comments

  1. nancy andrews

    hi would like to get some hillary clinton campain buttons.

about this blog

The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. TBR content is posted, created and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.

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