August 11th, 2011
Jon Huntsman’s recently-released website points to a bunch of problems with both his campaign and the idea of having an interactive website for any political campaign.
First, take a look at this particular post: Huntsman is pimping an endorsement from Jeb Bush!
. . . Jr.
Isn’t it a little early to be rolling out meaningless endorsements? Isn’t it especially too early to be rolling out endorsements that are designed to be semi-misleading? Jon Huntsman–now with real chocolatey taste and genuine Corinthian Leather!
Now let’s move on to the overall look of the site. Check out the Big Red H up top. On the pale blue background that could be waves gently lapping on a beach in a videogame.
Remind you of the aesthetic of any other political campaign you’ve seen before? I can’t quite place it . . . maybe . . . oh, this one?
If you’re Jon Huntsman and one of your four biggest electoral problems is that primary voters might identify you too closely with Obama, maybe you could wait to unveil the Obama-inspired graphic design elements until after you’ve won the primaries? Or maybe, not at all? Because if anything, the Huntsman “H” is even worse, suggesting as it does that the candidate walks on water. America just elected a god-president. It hasn’t worked out so hot.
Finally, go check out the comments section of the Huntsman item. A fair number of them are anti-Huntsman comments. I’m all for transparency, I suppose, but probably not on the website being paid for by the campaign. The problem isn’t that the website is paying to give a platform to anti-Huntsman trolls–they’re paying to give a platform to actual critiques of the candidate. (Some of the comments are much less flame-like than you’d assume.)
So what’s a campaign website to do? Well, you can curate your comments and turn into a pravda-ish world where thousands of people comment and none of them are ever, in the least bit, negative. (Like some conservative personalities do.) Or you can pay for a platform for people to criticize you. Or–and this might be way, waaayyyyyy out there–you could not have comments on a website run by a political campaign.
Oh I know. You have to have engagement! Social Media! Web 2.0! This is the New World we live in. I suppose.
But if someone on the Huntsman team could explain to me exactly what the added value of the 43 comments on that post are–how many votes they are going to translate to; how many donations–I’d be all ears.
I suspect that like the great majority of interactive value adds in the business world, the actual upside of this for Huntsman is vanishingly small, while the downside–placing negative reader feedback side-by-side with campaign propaganda–is pretty obvious.
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