The Web 2.0 Campaign for the White House
The presidential candidates may disagree about Iraq, health care and taxes, but their campaigns demonstrate a clear consensus that the rise of Web 2.0 tools offers the chance to engage interested citizens, one market niche, one voter, one message at a time.
A Candidate Engages Voters
Republican Mike Huckabee Explains His Views On Net Neutrality.
Business card sharing. Republican Rudy Giuliani has 247 connections on social networking site LinkedIn. It’s not difficult to conjure a game of “Six Degrees of Rudy” to see if the former New York mayor just might be connected to someone you know.
Second Life. Edwards has built a “campaign central” on Second Life, the 3-D virtual world and even received some virtual news coverage about its opening on the Second Life News Network.
Video mash-ups. Taking a page from Madison Avenue campaigns for candy bars and fast-food restaurants, Republican Mitt Romney is holding a contest for supporters to create video ads using images provided by the campaign site and to select the best. (Such an event shows both upsides and risks; SlateV, the video service of Slate Magazine, produced a short parody of the project.)
Games. And on Republican John McCain’s website, you can play the animated “John & Hillary Game,” and try and match questions with the correct candidates. (The game creators made the answers difficult to get wrong.)
Still Waiting for Campaign Killer App
But while Web 2.0 tools open up more channels to engage voters – including channels supporters open up themselves – the new applications also emphasize reaching the smaller markets, rather than the mass. “Politics today has become about [getting] hundreds of small hits rather than one big hit," observes Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and author of The New Influencers.
“Whatever they can do in the world to get that edge, they’ll do,’’ says Alan Webber, a customer experience analyst at Forrester Research, in Washington, D.C. Edwards, for example, "has the longest list of social networking sites I’ve ever seen,” 23 at last count, Webber adds.
Therein lies a potential quagmire. Although Web 2.0 applications offer the ability to go after a targeted audience—especially those age 30 and younger—and reach them in a fast, efficient, easy and less expensive way, Webber believes the message itself is getting diluted. That’s true in Edwards’s case, Webber says, claiming that his presence on a vast number of social networking sites shows he is “trying to be everything to everybody.”
Gillin adds that the Edwards’s campaign is using Twitter, a mobile blog that lets users send group IMs to people who subscribe to this service. (The campaign's entries are sporadic compared to say, a teenager posting "tweets" on a MySpace page.)
