WebProNews

Although it's John Edwards who has made recent news over his choice of bloggers, it looks like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have been the ones making better use of social media. We talk about brands and marketing from time to time on WebProNews, because the value of a brand comes from its recognition. Higher recognition makes it easier to market the brand's message to a target audience. Politics is no different. Three notable Democrats who want to stake a claim to the White House in 2008 have brands to build, with varying degrees of difficulty to overcome. Social media has been demonstrated as one way to attract an audience and reinforce the message a brand wants to communicate. The candidates have taken different steps to try and do what Howard Dean did in 2004 – engage people through a grassroots Internet-powered movement and generate donations to strengthen the campaign. Edwards took the bigger step, inviting well-known bloggers like Robert Scoble to hang out behind the scenes at his campaign, and hiring a couple of others to engage the blogging community. That latter example hasn't panned out perfectly for Edwards, as his choices for bloggers attracted heavy criticism, which in turn drew the interest of organizations like the New York Times before both left his campaign. That's not the interest Edwards wants. Marketing pro Mario Sundar wondered in a blog post at his site who might be doing a better job with social media, and getting people to their websites. Using data from Alexa, Edwards has drawn little relative traffic. Clinton and Obama both enjoyed spikes in traffic when their sites launched. Of the two, Obama's site has been much more direct about offering tools to people who want to support the candidate. Comparing the three candidates by their domain names, all of which serve as the official destinations for their campaigns, shows up differently on Compete. That site uses different traffic measurements than Alexa, and by their visitor figures Obama's site leads Edwards', with Clinton's far behind. Edwards would probably benefit from dropping the splash page for his site; very few non-art oriented sites use those now. Clinton has the best name recognition of the three, thanks to her husband who just happens to be a former two-term President. Her site may need a little more publicity. We're going to agree with Sundar that Obama does the best job in focusing on social networking with his site. He doesn't have Clinton's recognition or experience in federal politics, so he needs a strong grassroots effort to help him in the primaries. The site he has will enable this; now he just needs the people. --- Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark WebProNews: