First Person PR

Here’s an interesting piece by Drew Clark on GigaOm about the number of politicians using social media strategies for 2008. This of course, is nothing new, but I think 2008 may actually be the year that politicians incorporate social media into their ongoing strategies, vs. approach it as an after thought, which will be very interesting.

I think that was Dean’s problem last time around was that he put too much weight on the blogosphere and over estimated his popularity. Then again, he raised a ton of cash online, which was genius. This time around, the presidential pack has [hopefully] learned from the past. Even before running for president (at least officially), Obama had a weekly podcast, which opened him up to an audience outside his constituency. And I’m sure there were others incorporating blogs et al into their websites.

At the same time, YouTube’s YouChoose ’08, MySpace and Yahoo have created dedicated spaces for candidates. All this is good news in terms of voters having more ways to learn about each candidate and interact with them. It’s great that these candidates are embracing new technologies, and many have social media experts working on their campaign in strategic roles, which I believe is key.

Drew asks if Web 2.0 and the blogosphere will “bring down” the mass-media market in this campaign. My answer: not even close. Dean’s biggest fans were the ones blogging about him, and that proved to be his challenge. The candidate that wins this election will do so one vote at a time, and the most important votes are the ones he (or she, Hillary) don’t currently have. That means they need to present middle America with compelling reasons to watch their YouTube videos and read their blogs.

As I’ve said before, I believe social media is an extension of existing communications mediums, not an entity unto themselves. The technology is great, and allows deep conversations with a broad audience. But no politician (or company, or person), should assume that if you video tape it and post it, the visitors will simply come.

The great thing about presidential campaigns is they’re high risk, high profile, and incredibly high stakes. So we’ll get an idea of how much impact social media will have on each bid pretty quickly. We’ll also get to see, in real-time, which strategies work and which ones fail miserably.