The Bivings Group was featured on an NPR segment that discussed Presidential candidates use of the Internet this cycle. Following is the teaser for the piece:

Through ring tones, viral videos and social networking sites, presidential candidates are relying more on the Internet than any of their predecessors. We explore the highlights and examine whether cyber-connectivity translates into votes.

In the interview, I talk about Barack Obama’s web program and Ron Paul’s fundraising ticker.

You can listen to the interview here.

I think the most interesting move a campaign has made this cycle is Ron Paul’s decision to be completely transparent in his fundraising. For the last five or six months the central element of Ron Paul’s homepage has been a counter that tallies how much he has raised during the current quarter. A screen shot of the graphic is below.

In addition to this graphic, the Paul campaign has also published a feed of all its donation data that volunteers can access. This has lead others, such as Ron Paul Graphs, to do mash ups showing donation statistics. If I want to know how much Ron Paul is raising, I can go to any number of sites and get a real time number. This is in stark contrast to most of the other campaigns that, for the most part, keep fundraising information under wraps until they are forced to disclose the information publicly.

(more…)

Since Todd and Tom have recently critiqued Barack Obama's presidential website — apparently in its Blue Period — I was also thinking about the design of 2008 presidential candidate sites.

As someone with a search engine optimization (SEO) background, I probably focus a little bit more on title tags and anchor link text when evaluating a site than a someone who looks at the pretty pictures (or the lack thereof).

Well, I'm not alone.  Li Evans of the Search Marketing Gurus blog does as well, and has done some interesting campaign site evaluations from an SEO's perspective.  You can find them in the Political Internet Marketing category of the blog.

In these posts she discusses various SEO topics like page titles, keyword usage, and the actual content found on a site.  Further, she does look at a campaign's search marketing efforts, if any, and use of social media.  Her posts are worth a read.

So far, here are the candidate (or former ones) sites that she's reviewed:

• Joe Biden
• Chris Dodd
• Duncan Hunter
• Dennis Kucinich
• John McCain
• Barack Obama
• Ron Paul
• Bill Richardson
• Fred Thompson

Disclosure.

Barack Obama’s team has redesigned his website just prior to the Iowa Caucus and, well, I hope you like the color blue. I do.

I also think this redesign puts his web design effort at the top of the heap.

Starting at the top…

The over the top photoshopping of the clouds and lens flare as a background is so dramatically piled-on that you have to give the designers a lot of credit for even submitting it. The fact that it works is a testament to not only the designers but also whoever approved this thing. An extra cloud here, a ray of sunshine there and this effort is a parody. The photo used of the candidate is also pretty gutsy, with him staring into the future or whatever, but again in this new setting works just fine for me. The tone of the site now is one of confidence. No blaring headlines or screaming calls to action. Even the illustration used to announce his victory in Iowa is tasteful.

(more…)

In the summer I wrote a post vaguely complaining about the deterioration in the design of Barack Obama’s campaign website.

Here is the site when it first launched early in 2007:

I liked this. The design was clean and the site was really easy to navigate. After initially launching this version, the campaign spent a few months developing tons of great new features which they didn’t really have a place to put.

(more…)

On Tuesday of this week (December 18, 2007) NPR's new morning show The Bryant Park Project did a segment on the local perception of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, and his large and ardent Internet posse came up.  Like many others Bennett Roth of the Houston Chronicle guesses that Ron Paul supporters "are a little bit younger, a little bit more male, and certainly very disaffected."

Instead of letting the story end there, the show's on-line editor Laura Conaway decided to ask, "Who Are Ron Paul's Supporters?"  Unsurprisingly, Paul activists have flocked to the post to leave comments — 3,189 as of this posting.  However, not all of the supporters claim (hopefully, they're honest) to fit the stereotype that many of us think of this ardent group.

One is a "47 year[s] old, male, married, two children and a computer programmer. Never involved in politics until someone introduced [him] to Rep. Ron Paul's message."

Another is a "Fifty-something single female, employed in the arts."

Another respondent is a "54-year-old divorced woman… [and] very concerned about the decline of the dollar and inflation."

While another person is a "29 year old woman and married" who is works as a "self-employed Independent Sales Trainer, writer and stay-at-home mom."

One commenter states, "I'm an NPR listener and one of the 'secular progressives' so feared by the Fox news crowd."

Granted, many of the respondents are in their 20s or 30s, male, and work in a technical field, but not all.  Hopefully, The Bryant Park Project will interview of some the respondents who don't fit the stereotypical Ron Paul supporter to ask them why they support him.

When I showed this to my friend Kevin Anderson, who is the Blogs Editor for The Guardian in the UK, he was impressed by the response to this simple blog post since he could see how it can add to the greater Ron Paul story.

"I have often said to our journalists that only a fraction of our audience will respond to [a] traditional article, and often those responses won't add much to the story," Kevin e-mailed me today, "However, by guiding the discussion with a simple question or some framing of the debate or issue, I think participation not only increases but it's also broader and more diverse."

His remarks confirmed what I was thinking.  Not only do simple questions help participation on blogs, but they can have significant impact on the journalistic value of blogging.

Update: Due to the "Paul-valanche" of comments, The Bryant Park Project has turned off comments on the post. 

The Fred Thompson campaign, for whom we are one of the web vendors, recently launched a new consumer generated video program called Be a Star. The program encourages users to submit their own Fred videos to the campaign. Site visitors can then go to a page on the site to view all the videos that were submitted and vote on the ones they like best, much like Digg. Anyway, check it out.

Disclosure: we did work on this project.

There has been a lot of controversy today regarding last nights Republican CNN/YouTube debate, during which CNN asked Republican Presidential candidates 40 or so questions carefully selected from thousands submitted via YouTube by ordinary citizens. The gist of the controversy is that people are questioning the editorial process CNN used to select the questions and CNN’s vetting of the people asking the questions (it is coming out today that a lot of Democrats got questions in).

I personally have never been a big fan of the CNN/YouTube debate format and found some of the editorial choices made by CNN in both debates to be a bit baffling. I understand the symbolic value of having people submit questions through YouTube. I really do. However, to me having CNN editors pick and choose which questions to ask pretty much defeats the whole point of a “people-powered” debate. I think the CNN/YouTube process actually gives CNN more control over the things than a traditional debate format would. By putting the producers in a position where they can cherry pick from a vault of thousands of varied videos, you give them the power to choose inflammatory/off topic/goofy subjects that would be completely out of bounds otherwise. Kid, meet candy story.

The power of the social web is that it provides real people with access to unfiltered information, or even better information that has been filtered by people they know and trust. I don’t see anything revolutionary about a debate where CNN serves as our filter, just like they do every single day in choosing what they put on TV and their website. To me, this was a traditional, mainstream media driven debate masquerading as people-powered discourse. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I think something like 10 Questions, where questions are voted on by real people instead of handpicked by CNN, is a better model.  Ultimately the power is in the hands of the people who determine what questions are asked.

That’s my two cents.

What do you think?

I was doing some work on Google and did a quick search for Barack Obama. I wanted to go to his main campaign site, so I clicked on the ad that shows up as the first result. I often find just typing search phrases in Google quicker than trying to type in a URL or sort through where I have the site bookmarked.

Not surprisingly, I got taken to a page designed specifically for Google Adwords that encourages me to join the Obama mail list. Below is a screenshot of the landing page.

This is pretty typical. The only thing interesting here is that the page doesn’t include any obvious way to opt out of the sign up process. Most of the time when you do these sorts of pages you get the little “Skip to go to Website” option. Want to to go to the website? Can’t get there from here. It seems to be designed in a way that conveys that the only option is to sign up. (more…)

The conservative blog community RedState recently issued a ban on Ron Paul supporters from “shilling” for their candidate on the site. This led to a very entertaining exchange of arguments about the decision. Against the ban, you’ve got Captain Ed and David All. Defending the decision you’ve got Mike Turk, Lance Dutson and Erick Erickson from Redstate. And then David All and Mike Turk weighed in again.

Seriously. Go read this stuff. Very entertaining.

My take on this is that RedState did the right thing. But I have a different perspective on the matter than most that have commented so far. By banning Ron Paul “shills,” RedState was simply preserving what makes it a great site - it’s community.

I’m an old dude in Internet years. I’ve done my time on various message boards, blogs and community websites. And I’ve seen some of my favorite sites ruined by poor moderation by site runners.

I’ve watched sports boards that I loved devoted to the Texas Longhorns and the San Antonio Spurs go to crap due to poor moderation that allows personal attacks and off topic discussions.

I’ve seen the conversation level on fantastic liberal and conservative blogs devolve to the point of horror due to submissive admins.

I’ve watched how crappy the discussion is on newspaper websites like the Washington Post and USA Today due to lack of oversight.

I’ve watched Ron Paul supporters make any real political discussion on Digg impossible. I’ve seen these same folks hijack threads on this very site.

I can only imagine what a site like RedState is dealing with during an election year.

As an admin at one of these sites you have a responsibility to your community to preserve the level of discourse by providing oversight. If you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the core contributors that made your community site great to begin with. RedState did the right thing.

Nancy Scola over at TechPresident has the scoop on the latest attempt by a Presidential campaign to personalize mass emails. Basically, “Barack Obama” sent a “personal” email message out to his list yesterday about Hillary’s cash advantage. I am a member of Obama’s list and got the message. Then a few hours later Obama’s message was forwarded to me by some stranger in Leawood, KS with a personal note encouraging me to donate more cash. This same person from Leawood, KS also emailed Nancy, and the “from” address on the email was the same generic info@barackobama.com address that “Barack” emails me from personally. Basically, I think the Obama campaign has built some tools into their site that makes it easy for the most active members of their list to send mass emails to the least active.

This is just the latest iteration of a trend this cycle: impersonal mass emails that have been carefully doctored to look like personal notes. These stripped down emails have some common characteristics:

• They are usually from someone high up in the campaign who would never email you personally.
• They do not include any pictures or graphics and very little formatting (bolding, italics, etc.). So it looks likes something the sender could plausibly put together themselves.
• They include typical email subject lines like “FW” and “RE” that make it look like the sender just spontaneously decided to forward me something from Outlook.
• The text is the same press-office crafted spin you read in every campaign email.

Basically they are made to look like the work/pleasure emails we all get everyday from our friends, clients and co-workers, but are really the same old same old.

Part of me likes this trend. Theoretically, I prefer to receive text emails w/o all the formatting and pretty pictures.   I’m also confident these are working pretty well, based on Obama’s fundraising numbers.

But mostly I think these carefully crafted emails are just cynical and somewhat troubling. I think Nancy summed it up pretty well:

It’s worrying to me that the lesson that we thought we learned from 2004 — that people respond to personalized politics — is being so loosely interpreted to in 2008 in a way that seems to imply that people won’t know the difference between actual connections between real-live people and bulk emails from people who may as well be fake. There’s no difference between this email and one obviously written by the Obama press shop.

What do you think? Am I overreacting or does this tactic strike you are pretty cynical as well?

I came across an interesting interactive feature on USA Today’s website — the Candidate Match Game.

The premise behind this feature is pretty simple. A person selects one of a few defined responses to policy questions ranging from the war in Iraq to global warming to health care. Then at the end, it presents the three presidential candidates, including both Democrats and Republicans, that match a person’s answers the most. Further, users can weight different issues more or less than others, and the feature takes this into account when presenting the three candidates.

While the programming and logic behind this probably are pretty complex, the user experience is relatively easy. The great part about this “game” is that it takes relevant data that the newspaper already gathers and allows its website visitors to interact with it in a way that makes it meaningful to them.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this game to me is that it is possible for a person to find out that their top three candidates come from two different parties. If you had some interesting combinations of candidates presented to them by the Candidate Match Game, please list them in the comments section of this post.

The Bivings Group’s Fred Thompson Disclosure

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) recently launched a new campaign website that I find vaguely fascinating.  The site doesn’t look like any campaign site I’ve seen before and relies heavily on video.  Campaign sites have a tendency to all look the same and I applaud Chambliss for not being afraid to try something different. 

However, two things:

(1) On my laptop I actually have to scroll down on the homepage to find a Contribute or Join link and access the main site navigation.  Call me old school, but I think this stuff needs to be more prominent.  Design conventions exist because they help people navigate your website and quickly find what they are looking for.  Usability matters.

(2) Video is great, but you have to back it up with text.  The site features Chambliss talking about a variety of issues via web video, but nowhere on the site is there text expanding on the videos points.  Web developers should always remember that not everyone wants to watch your video and that the web is still primarily about reading good old fashioned text.  There is also this little site called Google that does much better with text than FLV files. 

Regardless, I would like to thank Chambliss for taking the road less traveled with his site.

<Via TechRepublican>

CBSNews.com and Washingtonpost.com are teaming up to share election-related content as a way of standing out in the increasingly crowded election news market. In a release about the partnership, CBS said:

The online relationship will join the rich tradition of both organizations, providing the combination of the most compelling video coverage from CBS News correspondents, producers and off-air reporters and the news, analysis and commentary from the Washington Post’s renowned political reporters.

The release also hints that CBS will be launching an ambitious Campaign 08 site in the coming months as part of this partnership. This come on the heals of the previously announced partnerships between the National Journal and NBC and USA Today and the Politico.

The media has always done some of its most innovative web work around elections. The election and election day sections of sites like CNN and Washington Post are some of the best things I’ve seen from the media in terms of technical execution.

I think we’re going to see some really fantastic online work in 2008 that will drive innovation for the entire media industry in the year following.

<Via Cyberjournalist>

Micah Sifry’s post last week about YouTube metrics got me thinking about which videos produced by the campaigns have been viewed the most on YouTube. Following is a list of Dem Presidential candidate videos that have attracted more than 200,000 YouTube views. I’ve excluded YouTube spotlight videos, since they tend to attract a ton of views no matter the candidate/quality of the question.

(1) Hillary Clinton: I Need Your Advice (627,335 views)

Clinton asks for help in picking her campaign song.

(2) Hillary Clinton: Pick My Campaign Song Take 2 (337,366 views)

Follow up to video #1 above that is a mash up of responses sent in by users.

(3) Barack Obama: My Plans for 2008 (334,261 views)

Video in which Barack Obama announces the formation of his exploratory committee and discusses his rationale for running.

(4) John Edwards: Ann Coulter on Good Morning America (294,280 views)

Video of Ann Coulter saying she wished John Edwards’ had been killed by a terrorist assassination plot.

(5) Mike Gravel: Campaign Finance Reform (275,855 views)

A video posted by the Gravel campaign in response to a leftover question from the YouTube debate.

(6) Barack Obama: Opposition from the Start (239,822 views)

Clips of Obama over the years expressing his opposition to the Iraq war.

(7) John Edwards: Hair (230,784 views)

Viral video produced by the Edwards’ campaign in response to the notorious Feeling Pretty video. First aired at the YouTube debate.

(8) Bill Richardson: Job Interview (208,210 views)

Viral video that highlights Richardson’s qualifications for the Presidency.

I’d classify these videos as follows:

• Numbers 1, 2, 7 and 8 (50%) are your classic viral videos put out to draw attention to the candidate/attract page views/raise money. They are heavy on humor and not issue oriented at all.
• Numbers 3, 5 and 6 (37.5%) are more issue-oriented videos, but have viral qualities all the same. The Gravel campaign smartly piggy backing off the YouTube debate to get some attention. The first Obama video piggy backed off the media coverage of his announcement while the second potently explains the difference between Obama and the other Dem front runners on Iraq.
• Number 4 (12.5%) is a rapid response video that was distributed widely by the Edwards’ campaign as part of a fundraising pitch.

I don’t really have a big point here, but I think anyone who reviews that list sees that successful YouTube videos don’t just come out of nowhere. They are the result of good planning/production and smart timing. In other words there is a real strategy to being successful on YouTube.

Fred Thompson Disclaimer