Blog P.I.

Two days later, I still haven’t been approved for an account at the official McCain social networking tool. I didn’t sign up under my own name, so perhaps that’s part of it — if nothing else, it matches McCain’s antagonistic legislative approach to the blogosphere. But Todd Zeigler of The Bivings Report got through, as he mentions in the comments. Here’s his page:

As he points out, all you can do there is donate, er, raise money and… actually that’s it, unless you count an e-mail form as a feature. Want to customize your page? There’s a single text box, a “Welcome Message,” and the McCain campaign reserves the right to edit or delete it. Want to find other users? Too bad. Maybe a widget or two? Sorry, it isn’t that kind of website. Zeigler at least managed to get a Pixies reference cleared as his user name, but if we’re giving McCain’s people credit for not misinterpreting it, that’s damn faint praise.

In fact, the only thing that’s social or Web 2.0 about this website is the name, and they can’t even get that much straight: it’s McCainSpace on the main page, but MyMcCain on the network itself. That should tell us something about how much thought they’ve put into it.

Writing for techPresident last week, David All counted McCainSpace as a positive:

The same web vendors who implemented mygop.com have turned that tool in to a “social networking” tool for McCain’s campaign. Barack Obama did the same thing, and I would expect every other serious candidate to jump in to the water sooner rather than later. The social network effort on a campaign website will help harness the energy swirling around your campaign, and get people coming back to your website as often as possible.

Except MyGOP failed, and the site as it exists most certainly will not harness any energy that may be swirling about. Compare the dashboard/sidebar from McCain’s “network” to the one from Obama’s:

     

For McCain you can donate money, sign up for e-mails, create a page (technically) and e-mail your friends. With Obama you can personalize your profile, find people like you, promote events, create affinity groups, raise money and even blog. And what more can I say about that B&W color scheme? On the main page McCain alone is in color, which is probably supposed to communicate something about him standing out compared to his rivals — but does it really need to be strictly applied across the entire site?

As the Edwards flap goes to show, campaigns should be careful about branching out into the blogosphere, but pretending to have a social network and a blog when you in fact have neither is a mistake, too.

This may be evidence that the McCain campaign, for whatever reason, doesn’t actually want to engage friendly bloggers. But then, McCain doesn’t exactly have a huge base of online support — which may explain this as a defensive stance, à la HRC. (Other possibilities include staff incompetence and vendor incompetence.)

It also underscores earlier observations that Republicans don’t have an online game like the Democrats. The reason for that probably has a lot to do with the fact that in 2004 there was no Republican scrum and hence no proving ground for online Republican strategists. Mike Turk, Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn got their feet wet during Bush-Cheney ‘04 and All picked up a Senate campaign in 2006, but so far GOP strategists haven’t had the same kinds of opportunities as Democratic strategists.

This year there are campaign jobs to be had, in site-building and strategy, so the gap should start to close (though in the short run said lag may only be magnified). What is the Republican equivalent of Blue State Digital or EchoDitto? There isn’t one, and it may be 2012 before there is.

Update: And back over to Zeigler, on the McCain camp’s unresponsiveness to yours truly and to Turk, who adds a different (but not necessarily incompatible) explanation for the lag, in the comments here and at his own Kung Fu Quip.