Iowa Campaigns and the Internet
A reader has been pestering us to post about Leonard Boswell’s MySpace for a little while now. I saw that Ed Fallon also had one, so I thought it’d be a good time to post some thoughts about how campaigns use the internet.
I’ve thought for a while that most political campaigns — especially in Iowa — use at most about 10% of the Internet’s potential for connecting with voters and organizing supporters. This campaign season is better than past ones here, but still, I’ve signed up for most of the Iowa campaigns’ email lists, and I get fewer than one a week from all of them except for Nussle’s. (Some, I’ve never gotten any from, even though I’ve signed up on their web sites. So maybe there have been errors with signup, too?)
The IDP sends out emails pretty frequently, but this week I’ve gotten about six emails with exactly the same thing each time (about a Medicare Press Conference), and that’s just annoying.
MySpace is nice, but it isn’t going to connect a campaign with rural voters all that well. And emails are good, but they usually only work for people who have already pledged support, because no one else signs up on an email list.
What could be improved? For one, the web sites themselves could all stand to be a lot more usable. That means things like taking more advantage of whitespace, making site organization more logical, making content more readable, and making the design easier to look at for long periods of time.
But it also means more interactivity. Real blogs would be nice (I haven’t seen a single thing I’d call a “blog” on any Iowa sites, even though Fallon claims to have one). Also, the photo galleries should be updated more regularly, so that candidates can say “check my web site to see if your picture got taken today!” at all of their appearances. That’ll get people to the web sites and keep them thinking about candidates.
In general, it seems like the people at the top of campaigns often see web sites as much as a liability as a tool, and that’s not helpful. I’ve been offering my help around to some campaigns, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to help out a little bit with this stuff.
For the money, there’s no better marketing tool than the Internet. Someday, everyone will realize it.
Add comment May 15th, 2006
