Will Hillary Clinton’s Conversation be Scalable?
January 20, 2007
Unlike Andy, I wasn’t shocked at Hillary Clinton’s announcement today that she is running for President.
It also didn’t surprise me that her campaign is leveraging emerging Web-based technologies to reach out in a new way. What did surprise me is the different approach that Senator Clinton took to this social media outreach. Her rivals, Senators Barack Obama and John Edwards have both begun social media campaigns that rely heavily on existing services and communities such as YouTube and BrightCove. By contrast, Senator Clinton has launched a series of interactive question and answer sessions via Webcast.
Senator Clinton needs to learn from her rivals and open her campaign up to community-based social media. I respect that she’s trying to centralize her online community around her Website, but reaching out is a very important part of building that community. She needs to be prepared to do that if she wants to compete effectively with Edwards and Obama among a youthful online audience.
Another problem with the webcast angle is that it relies on tremendous bandwidth. The beauty of YouTube and other such online communities is that they don’t rely on everyone’s being online at the same time to communicate. That reduces bandwidth requirements. For her sake, I hope that Senator Clinton’s campaign is prepared for overwhelming demand on their servers during these Webcasts. The last thing she wants is for technical difficulties to crash her conversation in the opening weeks of her campaign.
I think she has the resources she’s going to need, but one drawback is actually finding her site. If you search for “Hillary Clinton” on Google, you might think her site is hillary.org, or perhaps votehillary.org. She needs to get her actual site hillaryclinton.com, at the top of the page if she can. I think that the viral nature of a campaign these days will end up putting video on YouTube regardless by her supporters.
Daniel: I see that! How frustrating for her. I think that will be a pretty temporary phenomenon. Every blogger on the Web is linking to her campaign website right now. By the next Google dance, she’ll be at the top of the search results. Perhaps in the meantime, she should take out a Google ad on herself. She’s got the war chest for it!
Clinton Invites Supporters to Kick Off Her Campaign Blog…
The Clinton campaign has announced that they will soon be kicking off their campaign blog, and they’ve asked supporters to submit the first post. I think this is kind of a cool idea so far as buzz building and community……
[...] I posted before that my scalability concerns for the upcoming video conferences. It looks like I was right. If her servers become unavailable with just ordinary Web traffic. [...]