Is Barack Losing the Web War?

That’s what Howard Fineman asks. And the answer is no.

Look at Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign Web site. Not much going on there: no blogs, no video, no trail reports, no media-rich mechanics for involving people. What gives? Robert Gibbs, his communications director, tells me that all of that will change on Feb. 10—the day on which Obama is expected to formally declare his candidacy with a speech in Springfield, Ill. (I’m hoping he takes the Abe Lincoln thing all the way: a long black coat, a stovepipe hat and a speech of no more than 250 words.)

It’s true that Obama’s site is relatively feature-free. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that he was the only Democrat to the e-announcement thing right. Not just in his announcement video, but in putting up a bio video to give voters a sense of who he is. (No Flickr page or blog post can do that quite as well as video.) The Brightcove stat that jumps out at me is the fact that 48% of viewers sat through the nearly 6-minute video. Most Hollywood movie trailers on Brightcove fall-off to those levels at 1:30.

I polled my readers on which Dem they thought had the best web site. Unsurprisingly, Edwards leads the pack, with 34%, followed by Hillary at 26%, and Obama at 20%. People like content-heaviness and features, and Hillary’s shot up after her announcement because she provided this. But I admire the Obama team’s clarity and simplicity and in communicating about him, not loading down the site with bells and whistles that detract from the e-mail signups and donations that need to occur as the campaign’s first order of business.

David All makes a couple of key observations here. One on frequency of visits:

But what’s the hook that brings me back once, twice, three times a day? What are you doing everyday to keep me intrigued by Obamamania?

The dirty little secret of political websites, even fully-featured ones like Edwards’, is that very few people return… unless you hook them in as a subscriber via e-mail, RSS, or SMS. Generally, what we sacrifice in depth we make up for in mass. When I looked at the Bush-Cheney stats at the end of the campaign, I was floored by the sheer mass of people we reached. The catch is that most never returned. Hence the importance Obama is placing on collecting e-mail addresses to get people to come back.

David also writes,

The only problem with relying solely on traffic rankings is that a view from an influential like Howard Fineman or Seth Godin or John Fund v. a page view from John Doe in Chicago carry the exact same weight. However, they clearly do not.

Ah, the age old question! What matters more, quality or quantity?

If you’re selling a high-end consumer product or trying to explain a complex policy issue, then clearly the visit from Seth Godin counts more. But remember the end goal us politicos have in mind: 50% plus one. We need mass. If getting every voter to your web site every day is the equivalent of landing on the moon, a million-plus Drudgelanche is still low Earth orbit. And if you’re doing nothing more than attracting a few thousand technopolitical influentials, you’re dusting crops.

Campaigns need a strategy for influentials that they deliver through well-targeted niche media. But unlike most enterprises, they need to reach an absolute majority at the end of the day. And your margin in those races is not the influentials, but the hardest-to-reach voters of all — independents who only think about politics once every four years. Let’s have a conversation about how to reach them online.

Tagged: 2008 barack obama online politics

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