I've been researching candidates online for my local Democracy for America group and discovered something not entirely surprising about the Clinton site--it doesn't say anything. I've been writing commercial websites for about a dozen years now, and something I've heard for about that long is that it's important to update the content often and regularly so that the site stays fresh. Not having any solves that problem, but not in a way that attracts visitors. So I can't say I'm surprised her visitor total is down. There's simply nothing there to read. Believe me, I tried--and more than once. Obama's is thin, but there's some substance there--and more since the last time I checked.

The second time I visited, I was preparing last night for a guest lecturer gig I do every semester at a local state university, I took a look at websites for top contenders from both parties. My lecture will be on messaging as it relates to writing, and I thought I'd use presidential candidates a an example of how it's done. I was fairly shocked to discover that almost none of the leading candidates have a message that I could find or recognize on their campaign websites. Some have something like one inside the site. Others, like Clinton and Giuliani, have nothing. I recognize they're often viewed as a cheap little marketing trick, but they work to help people remember how candidates want to be seen--and, hopefully, what they stand for and are running on. Relying completely on their celebrity seems like a dangerous proposition to me as it leaves them wide open for others to define their candidacy. And we saw how well that worked for John Kerry.

My two biggest beefs, however, were the sites like McCain's that open with a splash screen asking for money. Unfortunately, it isn't the only one. Clearly I also dislike sites like Clinton's that have no section for positions on the issues. Kucinich wins kudos from me for having the most in-depth issues section. In my experience, any voter who takes the trouble to go online to research a candidate wants some substantial information. If not, they'll just watch the TV ads. Sites that fail to provide this will fail to attract readers. Candidates who fail to provide it will fail to attract supporters--IMHO at least.

The headline of this report is virtually meaningless... when you look at this chart the view is less clear:

http://blog.compete.com/2007/04/03/presidential-candidates-fundraising-s...

I think the biggest problem is that this report uses two snapshot days (01/07 and 02/07) and not a moving average or total for the period. As a consultant who helps facilitate community-created-content, I'd love some practical data on efficacy.

But all this report says is that having community content worked better on a particular Wednesday. I don't recall what the newscycle was on 2/07 but I'm guessing it had a lot to do with the number disparity given the chart above.

What I would really like to know is if it's actually better to create your own myspace or to engage folks in existing communities... With a major study (sorry the link escapes me) showing that folks are frequently abandoning their social networking pages to start over from scratch or to move on to another SocNet community, will these proprietary communities be ghost towns or thriving communities 9 months from now.

My guess is something in the middle with abandoned pages next to new construction and a few well maintained old pages. But the conclusion about community created content may be flawed or out of date as campaigns move to decentralized infrastructure a la widgets and embeds on external SocNet sites. How will we externally measure traffic when interaction takes place on 20,000 myspace pages via a widget instead of on the main site.

But I guess my main point is about a little editorial content or journalistic curiosity. If I can spot the huge issue with this report, why push the horse race story to an audience of insiders like this? The researcher should give this report some utility, go back and crunch the numbers over time so we can see if these conclusions hold true for more than 2 day or provide more earth-shattering conclusions than Obama skews younger than Hillary...

I think the biggest problem is that this report uses two snapshot days (01/07 and 02/07) and not a moving average or total for the period. As a consultant who helps facilitate community-created-content, I'd love some practical data on efficacy.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm quite certain that 1/07 and 2/07 represent months, not single days. Perhaps you just assumed that 1/07 was 1/07/07? If so I'm quite certain that is not the case. To call a single day representative of a month in this context would be nothing short of malpractice, statistically speaking. I believe you may have misread - and if not, please clarify.

My bad. I did read that as Jan and Feb 7th not the months of... Now I know why writers force me to style dates written out instead of the cleaner all-numeric format...

I'm curious though about the difference between the chart on Compete's page and your study. Not meant to sound accusatory. While the numbers show up there, it seems to me to be a offset in trending up that later normalizes after the big pushes of their respective initial hype. Obama announced later than Clinton. Visually, it seems more a result of that given the views post bump.

I don't know if that disputes or supports your conclusions combined with my anecdotal observations. Specifically, that while there's a huge initial interest in Myspace style functionality, and folks set up pages, most users quickly lose interest and abandon them when the content creation process becomes tedious and repetitive. The only folks who consistently keep their own content fresh are the same zealots (not meant disparagingly) who would live on blogs like Dean's in 04 and now inhabit Kos et.al...

The March trend seems as though it may be telling but it's just getting started, I'd be curious to see where that goes, but my main experience is that if campaigns don't provide real substance for their constituents to break up and redistribute, these online communities peter out quickly as folks move on to something else to hold their interest.

I'm not sure what difference you are referring to (and this was not *my* study, Comscore - a large analytics company - ran these numbers.) Eyeballing Compete's charts, it looks like they are pretty much in line with what Comscore found. Hillary significantly tops Obama in Jan, and in Feb Obama surges. Frankly the numbers look the same to me.

To your point that interactivity doesn't solely generate eyeballs, I completely agree. Here's something I commented on P. Ruffini's blog that perhaps will clarify my thinking.

...It is important to not conflate the presence of interactive systems with eventual outcomes. I.e. just because candidate X offers a social network, this does not mean that candidate X will be successful. Once we’re past this, some interesting points emerge.

Ultimately, none of this exists in a vacuum. Pageviews and uniques translate to something, but fundraising, feet to the pavement and mass mobilizations triumph. However, with this cycle I do believe that campaigns will more effectively be able to translate those uniques to action, so having the audience is incredibly valuable.