The Blogometer Jumps Into the Fray

by Patrick Ruffini :: April 10th, 2007 11:11 pm

The Blogometer jumps into the great Turk-Ruffini mele (I kid) with this:

We highly respect Ruffini and Turk but argue their analysis of the issue may be too colored by their backgrounds as party and candidate staffers. Too often in their analysis they ask what should the RNC or candidates be doing to better engage activists online. We think this misses the impetus behind the power of the netroots. The DNC did not dream up Atrios, and Howard Dean did not create Daily Kos. While the netroots strongly identify themselves with Dems, they are a separate movement formed after years of frustration over Clinton’s impeachment, Gore’s loss in FL, and the Iraq war. The Blogometer argues that the GOP is not going to see a potent online force until it spends a similar journey through the wilderness

I’m closer to Conn Carroll here than he might think. Content is the comparative advantage of candidates and campaigns, not necessarily community. (So, no, from a community standpoint, you can’t dream all this stuff up at the RNC.) People are genuinely interested in what the candidate has to stay (so long as it’s not too press release-y) because it’s news. For large organizations that do interesting things, the Web gives you an opportunity to be more authentic and responsive in all your communications, whether that’s top-down, lateral, bottom-up, whatever. For too many campaigns and groups, a blog is a press release with comments.

The key is to listen and to inflect your message with the voice of the community. If the blogosphere has stumbled upon some great, hitherto unknown reason for supporting the mission in Iraq or reforming entitlements or voting for a candidate, make that part of your message (so long as it’s consistent with your overall message and it’s not a pander). Smart communicators already know this, because they know it’s best to follow the path of least resistance to winning an argument.

If you’re the RNC or the DNC, the best thing you can do is read blogs, digest the really good arguments, and incorporate them into an ad. Make your October ads a compendium of the best Internet hits of March, April, May, etc. I don’t think it’s incumbent on you to create another space for blogging (though user generated content that’s focused on the candidate, the campaign, and the issues is a definite plus). First, people already have millions of other places to blog. And second, people will tend to dismiss anything on a party site as propaganda.

In 1996-97, the then rudimentary RNC website had a chat room where anyone could go on to, and I’d stop by from time to time. It developed into a genuine community (people would celebrate others’ birthdays). This simple tool was probably one of the best community-oriented things that the RNC has ever done online, but it built little connection or affinity to the party. It was all about lateral communications among users; had a party operative tried to take part in the conversation, no one would have talked to them. In many ways, that’s what the blogosphere is now. There will always be a certain disconnect between the parties and the online community.

The right has vibrant communities, but they don’t get covered as much because they’re pre-blogosphere. Free Republic was the first mover in this space in the late ’90s (spawned after a period in the wilderness?); when people talked about online ideological firebrands, they were talking about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. And traffic-wise, Free Republic is still in the Kos/Huffington Post range though its architecture is such that it doesn’t interface well with the blogosphere. Its recent facelift also belies Townhall’s long history as a central gathering place for news and opinion on the right.

I’m an optimist. The building blocks are there. Conservatives have and will continue to participate in online communities, and have done so for longer than the Left. And collecting email addresses is more science than art.

The time is ripe for smart, tech-savvy conservatives to pick up the ball and run with it, using these building blocks not to build “the MoveOn of the right” but to do something that hasn’t been done before.

Tagged: online politics strategy

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