Political blogging

My group podcast decided to go with the whole political blogging theme since the subject was very present and very new. The amount of social media tactics we've seen in this election is truly amazing and deserves to be noted.

While doing this project, I specifically focused on John McCain’s Presidential Campaign. I found that his site has a blog that is probably the most successful of any of its other social media strategies. They regularly blog, although it’s nothing much compared to Barack Obama’s blog. Rather the blog be used as a tool in getting the Republican’s message out about the campaign, it is more of an after thought to report on nomination wins. A couple unique things on the blog is readers can rate the blog posts as well as leave comments to each post. Digg and Delicious are on each of the blog posts. Also, the blog allows for posts to be emailed to friends. Search Marketing Gurus, a blog that includes a group of professional search marketers, points out some unused options of McCain’s blog, including the tags feature. Most recent posts have no tags which makes it difficult to categorize the posts. Another fault in John McCain’s blog is that it doesn’t allow for a reader to subscribe to the entire blog through RSS feeds but only to five separate issues such as Health, Economy, Spending, Campaign, and Iraq but one cannot tell what posts are included in each issue because the posts aren’t visibly categorized.

John McCain’s presidential committee started off early last year showing high expectations for social media usage within its campaign, but has since dropped the ball somewhat on promoting the five social media strategies they launched. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Veoh, and Yahoo! Answers are online projects the committee uses to actively interact with Americans and in turn, voters can engage with John McCain and learn about issues. National eCampaign Director Christian Ferry says, "People are fed up with politics as usual and Facebook and MySpace are giving them the opportunity to organize and influence the process in ways that could not have been imagined during John McCain's last campaign for President”. Although his committee recognizes the advantages of social media, they have done little to show they truly understand these sites by not playing on their key opportunities. The website doesn’t offer an easy way to locate the campaign’s social media strategies and the initiatives they’ve taken seem to be a result of “jumping on the band wagon”.

Search Engine Optimization for McCain’s campaign is somewhat successful. The official website ranks #1 in Google and Yahoo! for “John McCain” but not in Live nor in Ask. The Splash page was removed early this year and has since done little to improve SEO. As far as social networking sites, there isn’t a direct link to his Facebook page from his website, but one must physically search for John McCain once signed into the network. McCain has a personal social network called McCainSpace similar to Barack Obama’s but a major problem with this network is that it doesn’t reach out to intergrate with other social networks. It is a gated area for the McCain community that doesn’t spread the campaign’s message. Two video channels were created on YouTube and Veoh to host the same videos available at John McCain.com. In addition to these outlets, Yahoo! Answers initiates discussion with Americans about wasteful spending.

It's great to see that our politicians are trying to reach out to us in ways that make it easier and more enjoyable to get involved. Although the fact that all of this content is on the internet can make the elections even more of a popularity contest than in past years.