Visit Barack Obama’s home page this week and you’ll find respectful appeals to Hillary Clinton’s supporters, news, videos, inspirational quotes, and a variety of effective calls to action. Take a look at John McCain’s homepage and you’ll see (amongst other things) a well-placed promotion for McCain golf gear. Really.
This kind of comparison should help explain why I predict that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.
The Obama web team also does a great job of spreading the message all around the web. As the module on his blog page says, Obama is “Everywhere.” There are readily accessible links to Obama connections and content on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn, Blackplanet, Faithbase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve, and DNC Partybuilder. At Johnmccain.com if you dig deep enough, you’ll find links associated with myspace, facebook, and youtube.
Click through to McCain's Myspace page and you’ll find that he has a respectable count of 53, 218 friends. Obama, on the other hand, has 391,834 – and his myspace page – typically some of the crappiest looking pages on the web, even looks well-designed and, dare I say, presidential. (For a good laugh, take a look at some of the 62 "friends" on Bush's MySpace page.)
Kudos to the Obama team for recognizing how times have changed and for mastering the use of interactive channels for the good of their cause.
- Jon Fox