I'm going to run a series of three political web site analyses. We're going to start with Senator Clinton's website, go onto Governor Romney's, then do a meta-analysis of all the sites. I chose these two simply because that's where the dart landed when I threw it over my shoulder.Sometimes I think that's just about how people vote, but that's another story.
The version of Senator Clinton's site I chose to start with is from 23 June 07, about a week ago as I enter this. Some people called that day's website "The Softening of Hillary". It was the day the Sopranos style video and campaign theme song took over the site.
Political and campaign websites are constantly changing. The only websites that change more often are news and information sites like CNN, NYT and such. Something happens somewhere and politicians -- especially those running for office -- respond to it. Not only that, they respond to it each in their own unique way. They need to make sure you know they're different from every other politician and every other campaigner out there except, of course, when they want to show party unity or solidarity with a cause. Communicating their uniqueness while demonstrating unity and solidarity is called "messaging".It's an amazingly fine line, when you think about it.
Thinking about messaging is something I do a lot. During the 2004 presidential election cycle my company, NextStage Evolution, did a daily analysis of the campaign sites and were able to predict months ahead of time that the Edwards was going to partner with Kerry, that Dean was going to implode, that Gephardt was going to fail in the midwest and that the Republicans were going to take it all in the end. NextStage's analysis was the only non-political analysis routinely referenced by a George Mason University study on how politicians were using the web.
(more to follow)
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