« They’re Fredheads in South Carolina links for 2007-06-19 »

Hillary’s Neverending Song Contest

by Patrick Ruffini :: June 18th, 2007 11:30 pm

UPDATE: Lo and behold, they announce it this morning. (Mere coincidence? Or this blog getting results?) The “announcement” video is buzzworthy if somewhat odd — are Bill and Hillary supposed get whacked? Watch here.

A month ago yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign launched its “pick our campaign theme song” contest. A week later, they released a funny video debuting the second round, with Hillary coming off as (gasp) a normal human being.

If you were eagerly anticipating the final result, then you’re sure to be disappointed. Three weeks later and we haven’t heard a peep from the campaign on the winner. Voting is still open on HillaryClinton.com.

At first blush, it’s easy to call this an opportunity lost for the Clinton campaign. The campaign had effectively engaged tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans in the voting. Now it waits weeks after the excitement of the initial launch has worn off to tell us who won.

While this might seem befuddling, it makes perfect sense from a campaign perspective.

Take a look at the voting page — particularly the last part. Email address. ZIP code. For all the warm-and-fuzzies this is supposed to give us about the Clinton camp soliciting our feedback, at bottom this is a list-building vehicle. And so it makes sense to leave the “voting” open for as long as they can get away with it (though the current delay is getting kinda ridiculous).

Campaign teams always seek the holy grail of return traffic, but most of the time it’s a losing battle. Aside from hardcore junkies (read: us) campaign traffic is almost all new from day to day, week to week. Take a step back from our perch as online political junkies and that makes sense. Today’s campaign sites have almost nothing groundbreaking and interesting to say on a daily basis. Compare them to any popular blog, or to ESPN.com for depth and freshness of content and it’s no contest.

That creates a premium for maximizing return on the email channel, as that’s the only way to reliably drive people to a partisan site on a repeat basis. And the most effective email “asks” are almost never the straight-up “sign up” but contests or petitions that turn a one-time mobilization into a lasting relationship.

So that’s why Clinton’s song contest has been on the site for so long. It looks like poor form, but it’s probably netting them tens of thousands more email addresses.

Tagged: hillary clinton online politics

Comments (1) Trackbacks (1) del.icio.us digg it subscribe