OP-ED COLUMN
By Coco
A good social media campaign is dependent upon what, approximately 57 different things coming together? Whatever the number, it is far too broad a subject to address en masse in any one Your New Times piece. Brevity is one of our calling cards. (Okay, well it’s a goal).
With that in mind, we took a sneak peak at John McCain’s forthcoming social networking site, “McCainSpace.” The site’s welcome message trumpets:
“Get connected to other McCain supporters with McCainSpace! Be a part of our team, and soon you will be able to connect with other supporters to build our network of grassroots activists, take action and have fun. Sign up for your own McCainSpace page, and stay tuned for more features to get connected to other McCain supporters!”
This is an excellent idea to be sure. Social networks, niche ones, are a tremendous way to rally support toward a goal like, say, becoming President.
I signed up for McCainSpace page today. As always, in the name of full disclosure I must tell you I won’t be voting for McCain and that, in writing this piece I am not discussing his platform, but merely addressing his efforts in the social media space (as we’ve done with Obama and Clinton already). Anyway, signing up was fairly simple. The site does several smart things; perhaps the smartest is that they don’t ask for too much information from their users. A simple rule of thumb: the more you ask, the less you get when you are asking users to sign up for anything on the Web.
However, the McCainSpace experience gets a little
frustrating after that. The punchy “Welcome” description of what McCainSpace is does not feel consistent once you are in the house. In sum, the network’s main function seems to be about fundraising. The ability to actually interact with other profilers is very difficult and personally, I’m not willing to spend any more than the five minutes I did trying to figure it out. Am I lazy? No. I simply have normal expectations of how long this process should take, based on experience with other, good, social networking platforms.
The only functionality McCainSpace does make very simple is the ability to donate money. As a frustrated user of the site, that tells me where the actual emphasis is.
McCainSpace must have done a good PR job when it launched in February: ZDNet covers the story from what appears to be a press release. But, now that it’s April, I want to know how it’s working. The fact that a Google search produces almost no results for McCainSpace tells me all I need to know. It’s not working in any measurable way. And after my experience today, I think I know why.
Maybe Mr. McCain will have more luck on Linkedin where, just yesterday, he queried America (or, LinkedIn Americans anyway): “Please let me know what you view as the biggest challenge facing America and how you would like your President to address this challenge.” … too early to comment on this one. Stay tuned.