Can you say Politics 2.0 Avalanche?
If people thought Howard Dean was an Internet political phenomenon, 2008 campaigns for President, just begun, have the potential to say, "You aient seen nothing yet".
While Hillary - www.hillaryclinton.com - set a high standard with her opening three nights of web conversations in which she gained a reported 100.000 email addresses, Barack Obama - www.barackobama.com - is matching his rival step for step, and perhaps then some. In addition to his video announcement, Obama has added profound social networking capabilities to his website.
And the nice widget below.
Can you say viral marketing?
Certainly much is in flux and the rules are still developing. Barack had to close comments to permission only after an ugly reader posted comment found its way into and made the rounds of the press, and John Edwards had to seek a difficult middle ground (to his bloggers' posts prior to joining his campaign) between outraged public sensibilities and online free speech defenders.
On this Politics 2.0 site below, following the post, we employ (and hope you will make use of) many leading tools for viral marketing. For example, subscribe to this blog as a feed (e.g. My Yahoo, My MSN, My AOL, etc.) or as a widget delivered to you with all the latest headlines, join a community of those with similar interests or view Politics 2.0 information from other sites.
But for the Presidential candidates the stakes are, of course, much higher. It is possible that we will be getting there much more quickly than we thought (or not). When Hillary opts out of the public financing system because it contains only $150 million or so of funding while news reports estimate that it may in fact take $500 million to a staggering $1 billion in total campaign fundraising for a winning campaign, obviously the roadmap and rules of engagement have changed.
Sites have sprung up to compare which Presidential candidate has the most friends on MySpace and other social networking sites, and also on which candidate videos to YouTube and other sites can be compared.
Who needs the network news anymore when we have such tools of this type? The candidate controls their own message, and the audiences are becoming quite large. I envision a day (we're not there yet) in which requests for interview profiles by major news outlets are left unanswered by the top campaigns in favor of these more controllable (and eventually potentially larger) politics 2.0 audiences.
And traditional debates? Someday they may be seen as too unscripted, too risky. Nah, why would they want to do that?
Alex Hammer Sphere: Related Content
No comments:
Post a Comment