epolitics

The common wisdom is that BarackObama.com is not only better at wrangling donations from the faithful, but is categorically better than JohnMcCain.com because it embraces an interactive as opposed to a broadcast model. Time's Michael Scherer put it this way last April:

Even today, if you go to McCain's website, you are more likely than not to find a page that just asks for money and broadcasts the campaign's message, with issue papers, press releases and videos.

By contrast, Obama's website is engineered for engagement: prompts invite people to volunteer, make phone calls and find nearby events. "Don't just fill out this volunteer form and wait," it reads. "Get started on your own." The blog is maintained by a former journalist; the social-networking function is managed by a founder of Facebook.

I don't disagree as far as BarackObama.com's depth of content goes. But let's not kid ourselves. At its core, BarackObama.com is not truly interactive. It is transactional.

The first time you hit the Obama website, you'll get a splash page prompting you to sign up for the email list. This is good practice, as the sign up form can get lost in the message-of-the-day clutter of the homepage. This way, you can change the homepage at will while still focusing on the most important thing: getting new people to sign up.

But the difference on BarackObama.com is this: the homepage above the fold hardly ever changes.

On Monday, the 173,593th article on the Obama-McCain online gap appeared in the Politico.  (Blame the Northern Virginia electric monopoly for my just getting to this today.) Jon and Soren are quoted in it.

This one inches closer to the truth than most by looking at online success as a function of the candidate, the culture of the campaign, and the environment. These anecdotes are revelatory:

When John McCain, 71, wanted Barack Obama, 46, to join him at a series of town hall meetings, he dispatched a messenger to hand-deliver the invitation. "You know, you could have just e-mailed this," Obama press secretary Bill Burton told the messenger.

And: 

"Every time Obama had seven seconds when we spent the day together in South Carolina, he whipped out his Blackberry," recalled Noble. Contrast that to McCain's response when Politico's Mike Allen asked him whether he used a Mac or a PC: "Neither. I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get."

A number of good friends of mine work on the McCain online campaign. With these stories, there's a tendency to malign or dismiss the campaign staff as "not getting it." I know these people and can say definitively that this isn't the problem. This is a very talented group of people, albeit under-staffed compared to Obama's double digit online staff and not always integrated into the campaign at the highest levels. When the McCain campaign has decided to own a space -- whether it's been search advertising (Eric Frenchman), blogger outreach (Patrick Hynes) and actually good campaign blogging (Michael Goldfarb), they have dominated it.

Ever since the kerfuffle on MyBO earlier this week, I've been spending a little time poking around the site. I even cross-posted something from here to get the hang of it. 

MyBO is often credited in mainstream media with helping build Obama's remarkable volunteer operation. At the same time, the conventional wisdom among webbies is that internal social networks don't work. Nobody wants to create yet another profile (particularly on a site with such a limited audience), and best to concentrate your energies on existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. 

My initial runthrough found many ways in which MyBO failed to live up to the hype, including:

If you like this post, Digg it.

The conservative blogosphere is in a full-on feeding frenzy over an anti-Semitic, user generated blog post on My.BarackObama.com entitled "How the Jewish lobby works." The Obama campaign has, appropriately, scrubbed the post from its website.

At LGF, Charles Johnson sums up the usual guilt-by-association argument:

By the way, it is absolutely no excuse to say that “anyone can post a blog there.” Barack Obama isn’t running a Blogspot blog, he’s running for president of the United States, and his official web site is full of hatred and antisemitism.

The Obama campaign is right and Charles, Hot Air, Malkin, and the rest of the conservative blogosphere are wrong.

Barack Obama's Internet operation is beginning to resemble a mid-sized tech startup with 8 figures of Sand Hill Road money more than it is a political campaign. The Obama Internet team hit the ground running with ten staffers in February 2007, including Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Don't be surprised to see them recruit more tech and data geeks for the general, including former Clintonistas and from Silicon Valley.

Their raw work product -- even beyond the stunning online fundraising results -- is impressive. One of my hobbies since January has been taking screengrabs of every interesting new page or feature on the candidate websites and posting them to my Flickr account. The threshold for inclusion was simple: pages that in my experience as an online staffer took more than a few man-hours to produce. This is a living archive, even the deep-linked pages 5 or 6 levels down, that will go on long after the sites are taken down or redesigned. 

The level of detail on the Obama site is nothing short of phenomenal. You've got individual microsites built for Pennsylvania Neighborhood Teams, West Virginia Faith Captains, Oregon Community Organizers This is not stuff plopped in off some template, but stuff that only a large team can produce.

John McCain is never going to have the resources to do this kind of deep dive on his website. But he doesn't have to.