Maintain the Personal Touch …
May 15, 2008
especially if you are politician using new media to get you where you want to go. Big money presidential politics have learned the good lesson from Deans failed run. Edwards jumped on Twitter early, most of the big names have blogs. [Clinton, McCain] They all have Facebook and Myspace pages. The blogs, instead of writing as obviously ghost written first person, they take “contributions” from supporters, staffers and etc. but it is still just PR snapshots meant to “serve” as internet savvy connection. Then they spam it like there is no tomorrow [like Hillary's twitter is nothing but links to their site], rendering all of its connective goodness useless as you hit the delete but on that “friend”
Obama has had a different spin. His tweets have been absent the fake first person, more informative and far from spammy numbers. They balance between the requisite links back to links to other stuff (beneficial comments) or just simply “We are at…”. They friend you back rather than just gathering a ton of followers and who knows if they actually follow, they have to be checking for the name drop nonetheless. But when I added his campaign account on Flickr to my contact list someone actually wrote back.
Now, to entertain the cynic, it is not truly personal and they obviously haven’t looked at my photos (I checked the stats). Very well could have a rote message that automatically populates my name. But at least they made the effort to manufacture a real sounding message (for my part I believe they actually have a few interns running the web game and really respond) and best of all, they didn’t fake it from Obama. They kept it really, signed by the girl in charge of running the account. It feels more like a real connection. I can’t fool myself that they would let him spend the crazy hours answering back crackpots like me.
But if they could ever figure out how to aggregate that message that I am sure comes back in a real and authenticate way, include it in the coversation on the stump or even tweak policy in response, populist might get a 21st century make over
Just for the hell of it, I asked, via Twitter, if they reply. Will check back if there is a reply.
Update - Obama’s Twitter replied
Cool.
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May 15th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
JEALOUS!