Conversations begin with Dialogue

Categories: Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy, Web Tools, Web UsagePosted on January 22nd, 2007

Hillary Clinton wants to have a conversation with the American public. She nods to Social Media as the technology to enable this, and takes some ideas from ClueTrain Manifesto.

This is kind of hard to do since she’s failed to do the following:

1) The player she’s launched her video does not have a share or embed feature

2) Comments are not enabled

3) There are no forums, wikis, or other social tools that enable conversation

There is however a feature that encourages the community (in this case, citizens) to write the first blog post. Strange, as I have my own blog to do that, I really want to hear Hillary’s voice, not mine to kick start this conversation.

Obama launched his exploratory program using online video (and the embeddable and conversational youtube player) as well as John Edwards.

Jeremiah’s Presidential Social Media Scorecard:

Hillary Clinton = 1 point for basic website

Obama = 2 points for basic website with social media deployment

Edwards = 3 points for basic website, social media deployment, and blogger relations in real life.

By the way, this is not a political blog, it’s primarily a Web Strategy blog, and I intend to keep it that way by commenting on deployment of tools, rather on the sole focus of issues . I’ll leave that to all the other political pundits out there.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 5:07 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy, Web Tools, Web Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There is a more social Hillary For President site at http://www.votehillary.org/CMS/.

Posted by Rob Safuto on January 22nd, 2007 at 6:57 am

Thanks Rob, I assumed she did have these tools (which your link indicates) it’s just that if she’s going to talk about conversations, the tool itself should be ‘conversation ready’

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 am

Conversations may begin with “dialogue”, but they won’t end up that way. Conversations can be endless, pointlessly circular, with nothing whatsoever accomplished. I guess it makes all the bloggers feel good and feel ‘apart of the process’, as politicos are now pandering not only to journalists but to all the shaky cam YouTubers. As cameras are the new people.

If anything it makes them more plastic, announce on video and on some web site, without having to press the flesh or tour the country as much, and this is considered “social media”. Nothing new under the sun, to quote Ecclesiastes, it’s still all basic influence peddling, the techies like to buzzword and ham it up, dissecting it into Powerpoints and Gartner Quad Charts, but at it’s core, it’s all so much pandering to the webhead and blogger egos. They don’t want raw information or case studies, nooooo it has to be all quasi-hippie, neo-Cluetrain touchy-feely, namby-pamby conversationally “social mediaified”.

Just another segement to influence…certain big customers want 24/7 attention, others want hard facts or real product info, some want personal relationships and freq. site visits, consumers want a good warranty process and good value for money, bloggers want their hands held, comments enabled, with a Milk and Cookies before bed time. Just make sure you adopt the lingo and sing the same campfire songs.

Posted by Christopher Coulter on January 22nd, 2007 at 11:41 am

Chris, maybe.

There’s a huge opportunity for those that have power to use these tools to talk to those that make decisions.

I guess we’ll see which one of these politicos figures out how to cater to this webhead and blogger ego, I’m listening and waiting.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 am

I tend to agree with Chris. How can a feedback blog be given any more polical merit than, say, writing a letter to your congressman in crayon. Their blog’s first order of business must be to pander to the Web 2.0OOOOh Yeah! crowd. “Vote Hillary, we’re smart and can use gradients!”

But I also think heated debates on such blogs could be influential in some manner, if they were entertaining enough to spur coverage in mass media.

Posted by IrateEngineer on February 1st, 2007 at 1:39 pm

Irate Engineer

Blogs are the voices of people, these people can vote. For a person who’s power is determined by people (at least at the early stages) discounting a blog is discounting their power.

Blogs and other social media can have impacts in search results, which can impact brand.

Do a search for “Dell Support” and look for zawodny’s post. It used to be ABOVE the official dell site.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on February 1st, 2007 at 1:54 pm

I don’t disagree with your point, but I don’t think there will be enough people searching the web for political opinion to bring some heated opinion in a blog to the top of a search result. At least not until voting via the web is legal and everyone is searching the web for advice on who to vote for while they are voting.

Posted by IrateEngineer on February 1st, 2007 at 7:17 pm

[...] Hillary launched her campaign with video –deployment somewhat successful The ‘viral’ video that Hillary launched did not have full social features, it was not easy to share. I documented on this post. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Web Strategies of the 2008 Presidential Candidates on April 5th, 2007 at 9:05 am

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