Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

This is the Fred Thompson installment of a series of 11 posts I am presenting today here at ElephantBiz.com surveying the social-media aspects of the websites of the 11 Republicans currently running for President. (See: "Grading the Candidates' Blogs.")

Fred Thompson's pre-campaign website, Imwithfred.com, is state of the art and includes some features I haven't seen on any other candidate's website - fitting for a candidate who promises an unconventional campaign. Before we take a look at the blog, let's look at the home page...

It has links to the official Fred Thompson '08 pages on four social-media networks - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter - and the usual buttons you expect on a campaign website: "Donate" and "Sign Up." But then there's some features you don't always see on campaign sites. The "Raise Funds" feature allows bloggers to download a web widget to install on their own site to help raise funds for Fred. The "Call Talk Radio" button provides users a directory of talk radio shows, with call-in numbers, by state and metro market. And the "Write a Letter" button allows users to send a letter to the editor of any newspaper, or all newspapers, in a given metro market or state, with the click of a few buttons.

Now, to the blog. The Fred File is a standard-issue blog, with posts by both campaign staff and by Fred Thompson himself - his first post drew more than one hundred comments in the hour or so after he mentioned the website address on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last week - and, to date, it has drawn 260 comments. Users can sign up for an RSS feed of all posts from the blog, or just posts from Fred Thompson himself. And users can submit posts to Digg, Del.Icio.us or Facebook.

There's also a blogroll - it's not a "Friends of Fred" blogroll, but rather a select list of conservative blogs, the kind of blogroll you might put on your own blog if you were a conservative blogger and were serious about participating in the online political discussion.

If that blogroll represents Thompson's regular blog reading habits, he's going to continue to have a lot of friends in the conservative blogosphere.

I'd suggest the campaign also add a "Bloggers for Fred" feature to take advantage of the big blogospheric buzz about Thompson, as well as an aggregator of blog and news items about Fred. Given what I know about his new-media team, I suspect that Fred Thompson's site is only in its initial iteration and will evolve in the months ahead in innovative ways that may be unique among the presidential candidates' websites. 

As of now, it already gets a grade of A-.

Update: For reviews of social media efforts of the other 10 Republican presidential candidates, see the list below: