Todd Zeigler of The Bivings Group, a DC-based Internet communications firm that is doing web work for Fred Thompson's campaign, reviews Ron Paul's web strategy in a blog post at The Bivings Report...
His approach is novel. Instead of building an infrastructure on his own campaign website. like most candidates have done, Paul has created a portal to his presences on various third party websites.
The Paul website itself essentially consists of a homepage, an issues section, a bio page, a donation form, a sign up form and a blog. Interestingly for the social candidate, his blog doesn’t even allow comments. Instead, it encourages visitors to discuss/interact with the blog content on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook. He seems to deliberately avoid building a community on his own site. Due to this, supporters have no choice but to organize elsewhere.
Paul relies on third party tools for fundamental aspects of his website:
(1) Videos are entirely hosted and served from his YouTube account.
(2) Campaign news gathering and discussion of said news is done via Digg. Paul is the only candidate I’ve seen that includes a prominent link to a Digg search of his name right on his own homepage.
(3) Paul’s schedule is kept exclusively on Eventful.
(4) Supporters are encouraged to create their own events on Meetup.
(5) Campaign gear is sold exclusively through a store hosted by Cafe Press.
(6) All photos are on Flickr.
(7) Social networking occurs on Facebook and MySpace.
His website is basically a mashup of all this stuff, with only a few core functions being performed by the website itself. Lots of campaigns have played around with this stuff. Paul is the only one I’ve seen that truly relies on these tools to perform mission critical campaign functions.
Obviously, as a long shot candidate with a limited budget, the use of these free tools is done out of necessity. But the strategy here is also very sound: by not giving supporters much to do on his own site he maximizes the amount of noise they make in other venues. It is the perfect approach for an insurgent candidate like Paul.
In my recent review of Paul's campaign website I was critical of Paul for not allowing comments on his website's blog, and for otherwise failing to engage the blogosphere very effectively. His use of other social-media platforms may be working, but his campaign website doesn't reflect that at all. Zeigler looks at Paul's site and sees a real "strategy" at work to send Paul's supporters out to create "buzz" on the big social media platforms. I see an underfunded candidate who may have blundered into a half-decent social-media strategy out of a desire to save money.
"I see an underfunded candidate who may have blundered into a half-decent social-media strategy out of a desire to save money."
I see a fool calling success 'blundering' because he does not care to see that certain ideas (liberty, individualism, peace) are succeeding.
Posted by: John Howard | June 24, 2007 9:54 AM | Permalink to Comment