'08 Candidates: Talking With Us or Talking To Us?

Every major presidential hopeful now has some combination of a blog, a MySpace page, a Facebook presence and a stack of YouTube uploads. Two months into 2007, the question is no longer whether candidates are online. It is whether anyone on the campaign is reading what we write back.

When I ran a regional newspaper website, our rule of thumb for judging a reader forum was simple: does the staff ever reply? A site can host ten thousand comments and still be a one-way broadcast if nobody on the other end responds. That test applies just as well to the 2008 campaigns, and it cuts across both parties.

The 2004 benchmark

Any discussion of campaign blogs starts with Howard Dean's 2004 primary run. Blog for America, the campaign's official blog, kept comments open, and threads routinely ran into the hundreds of replies. Staff posted frequently, supporters used the threads to organize local events, and campaign manager Joe Trippi treated the readership as a source of ideas rather than an audience to manage.

It is easy to romanticize that blog. The Dean campaign did not win a single state until Vermont, after Dean had already withdrawn from the race, and the comment threads sometimes turned into echo chambers that gave staff a distorted sense of momentum. Still, it set an expectation: a campaign blog with open comments and active staff participation feels different from a press release page with a date stamp.

A ladder for measuring conversation

Rather than sort candidates into "gets it" and "doesn't get it," I find it more useful to place each online presence on a ladder. Here is the one I have been using while reviewing campaign sites this winter:

1. Broadcast only. News releases, speeches and photos. No way to reply on the site itself.
2. Collection. Forms for email signups, donations and volunteer offers. The campaign wants something from you but offers no public reply channel.
3. Open comments, silent staff. Visitors can post, but nobody from the campaign appears in the threads.
4. Moderated dialogue. Staff respond in comments, answer questions or link to clarifications, and post a moderation policy.
5. Candidate participation. The candidate personally answers questions in some recurring, visible format.
6. Feedback that changes something. The campaign shows that a suggestion from supporters altered a plan, an event or a policy detail.

Most campaigns, in my reading, hover around rungs two and three on their main websites while experimenting with rungs four and five elsewhere. Very few have shown evidence of rung six, which is the only one that proves listening rather than performing it.

Social network profiles are not conversations by default

MySpace and Facebook look interactive because they have "friend" counts and comment walls. In practice, a candidate profile often works like a billboard with a guestbook attached. Thousands of supporters add the candidate, leave a short message of encouragement and move on. Unless someone on staff writes back or uses those friend lists to invite people to real events, the profile is a list of names.

These profiles also carry risks that a campaign website does not. Last May, a MySpace profile set up for Senator John McCain used a page template that pulled code from a web designer's server. The designer, Mike Davidson, changed the file on his own site, and the profile briefly displayed a fake statement about the senator's positions. No serious harm resulted, but it showed how little control a campaign has over a page hosted on someone else's platform and built from borrowed parts.

Facebook adds another wrinkle. Since it opened membership to anyone last September, groups devoted to candidates have multiplied, many created by supporters or opponents with no connection to any campaign. A voter searching for a candidate there may land in a group the campaign has never seen. Talking with people in that setting means joining spaces the campaign does not own.

Video: a monologue with a comment box

YouTube channels are the newest addition. Candidates from both parties now upload speeches, announcement clips and behind-the-scenes footage. The format is naturally one-directional, but some campaigns are bending it. In late January, Senator Hillary Clinton held a series of live web video chats over three evenings, answering questions submitted online. Other campaigns have posted clips responding to viewer questions or comments. Whether those questions were representative or carefully selected, viewers cannot tell, and that ambiguity is the central problem with staged interaction.

Comments under YouTube videos are a separate matter. They are often hostile, juvenile or off-topic, and most campaigns appear to leave them alone. That is understandable, though it means the most visible public reply channel on the most watched platform is effectively unattended.

The advice I would push back on

A common recommendation from cautious consultants is to switch blog comments off, or never turn them on, because an open thread invites trolls, opposition plants and embarrassing remarks a reporter might quote. I think this advice protects the campaign from a small risk while guaranteeing a larger one.

A blog without comments in 2007 signals that the campaign wants attention but not replies. Readers notice. Bloggers on every side of the spectrum point it out. And the conversation does not disappear; it moves to other blogs and forums the campaign cannot moderate or answer. My newspaper site learned this the hard way: when we closed comments on contentious local stories, the discussion migrated to a community forum where our reporters had no voice and rumors went uncorrected for days.

The alternative is not a free-for-all. It is a published moderation policy, applied consistently, with a clear statement of what gets removed and why. Off-topic spam, threats and personal attacks go; criticism of the candidate stays. Keeping a sharp but civil critique on the page is itself evidence of listening.

Questions any voter can ask

You do not need access to campaign data to judge whether a site is talking with you. Try these on any candidate's online presence, regardless of party:

• Does the blog allow comments, and is there a written policy for removing them?
• In the last ten posts, did any staff member reply to a commenter by name?
• Does the candidate appear personally, in writing or video, answering questions not chosen in advance?
• Can you find a single example where the campaign credited a supporter's idea?
• When you send an email or a question through the site, do you ever hear back from a person rather than an automated message?

Where this goes next

Campaigns are still treating these tools as experiments, and in a race this long that is reasonable. The test will come in the fall, when staffs grow, schedules tighten and the temptation to retreat into broadcast mode gets stronger. That pattern already shows up in paid media, as Rosalind described in her look at blog ads aimed at partisan readers, and in my January piece on campaigns in Second Life, where the appeal of novelty often outruns any plan for real exchange.

I will revisit this ladder periodically and note which campaigns move up or slip down. Updates will appear under social media. If you have seen a campaign respond to a supporter in a way that changed something, send it in; I would like to report more of rung six.