Maintence is not optional
I enjoyed the example about the poor strategy of the George W. Bush campaign website originally. I could specifically relate to the parody website GWBush.com. I showed many of my friends, and it really made them mad. I was amazed at the indifferent attitude of the Bush-Cheney campaign managers toward their website originally.
I worked on a race in South Carolina, I was always hounding our campaign about how poor our website was compared to our competitors. Our announcement website was a poor attempt to just put a site on the internet. By campaign time, we had a great site, but for the first few months, I was incredibly frustrated. I checked it frequently - for new ads or campaign finance progress - and there were few updates and poor content. By the end, we had a blog, online fundraising, and many other good technologies. We didn't lose because of our website, but I feel like it would have been more useful to have had all of that from the start instead of in October.
In my experience, many in my generation (and even voters near my parents age) would ask me for the campaign website. Instead of relying on the newspaper endorsements, they read through each candidate's website platform before choosing where to place their vote. That's amazing, and it's part of the persuasive power of the internet. If campaign managers can figure out how to harnness this power, they might see dividends on election day. If they remain in the dark ages, it's likely their job and their candidate will be history.
2 Comments:
It is so interesting to read how the Internet influences political campaigns in the United States.
I wish that in developing countries the Interent was a useful tool for politicians.. but let me tell you...I am convinced that many legislators in developing countries are so unprepared and uneducated that they hardly understand how the Internet can help them in their political careers.
Everytime I hear you guys discussed your experiences with the Internet in political campaigns, i am thinking that in developing countries this is a market that should be implemented.
But the main problem is not only the lack of education from politicians and voters. It has to do with poverty and how more than half of the population does not has access to a computer.
In rural and public schools to have one computer is a blessing. Children and teenagers in poor neighborhoods are afraid of computers. They are voters as well, so the use of the Internet for political campaigns, unfortunaley, will have to take its time.
One of the first projects I was involved in when I started at the internet consulting firm I work for was to site map the Bush and Kerry websites.
I was amazed...actually, it was more like appalled.
Talk about websites that suck.
The Kerry site was difficult to navigate, had no blog (at the time), limited interactive ability, and was uncreative in it's design.... AND HIS WAS THE BEST ONE!
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