Candidates and Web Communities: How much do they matter?
BY Morra Aarons | Wednesday, December 12 2007
Do Iowa and New Hampshire hold so much power that the world wide web is just dwarfed in comparison? It seems that way. Although John Edwards has just signed on to answer TechPresident's "10 Questions," most of the candidates haven't. Over at BlogHer.com, we are scratching our heads too, as co-founder Lisa Stone writes today:
Our political team is confused by the response of presidential candidates to BlogHer, and to some other organizations and blogs by women. For the past six months, BlogHer has invited seven leading presidential candidates -- Democratic and Republican, we're non-partisan -- to participate with BlogHer's influential, passionate community of now 7.6 million techno-savvy women, who write and read thousands of influential blogs.
Furthermore:
And there’s more -- what really confuses us is that:
# Instead of the presidential candidates, BlogHer has been offered an opportunity to interview two candidate spouses, Ann Romney and Michelle Obama (more in our action timeline below)
# Just this week, two presidential campaigns (Senators Clinton and Obama) started marketing new Web sites devoted exclusively to women, even specifically to moms. These are the very women who populate BlogHer's conferences, visit our sites and write the blogs in our ad network. In fact, if they’re trying to reach moms, the majority of BlogHer's 1,100 BlogHer Ad Network members are mothers, and most blog about that parenting experience! (More detail, including their recruiting letters to women and moms in our action timeline below.)
You see, at BlogHer we thought the lack of interest in engaging with our community, and others like it, was about gender. Oprah is one thing, but online women's communities tend to get this kind of soft in the head treatment from campaigns, as this email promoting MomsforHillary attests:
"The holidays are in full swing - what would you want most? A night when you can put up your feet with your favorite pals and have someone throw a party for YOU! You can be that one lucky person who is randomly selected from the first moms who sign-up on the Moms for Hillary website to receive a fabulous - and very unique - prize.
I hope Mark Penn has some polling data somewhere stating that women just love this kind of stuff, because frankly, I think it's insulting for a candidate to assume the majority of the voting population wants a party rather than a good president.
But maybe the candidates' disinterest in engaging with voters online is about neither gender nor techiness: it's about resources and time. It's Iowa, New Hampshire, or bust. Sucks to be the other 48 states, but oh well. That's the game.
Oh well. I'll just tune out then, since my attention isn't needed right now (I live in Massachusetts).