eric tatro dot com

In 2004 we saw the Howard Dean campaign really show how blogging and the Internet could help raise awareness and understanding of a presidential candidate. While we now take it for granted, it was pretty revolutionary for a politician to keep a blog on the campaign trail back then, and his novel use of the Internet worked – Dean received record campaign donations via his Web site and was subsequently, for a time, considered by many to be a Democratic front-runner in the race for President of the United States.

Since 2004 blogging has become almost routine, but we’ve seen exploding popularity of social networking, “social news” sites, podcasts and RSS, wikis, and online video. While we will undoubtedly see these technologies incorporated by candidates in the run-up to the 2008 election, one candidate has really emerged from the pack as especially savvy: Mitt Romney.

If you take a quick look at the front-running candidates, you’ll find McCain, Obama and Clinton utilize online video, Giuliani has an RSS news feed, and John Edwards, in addition to having a blog, podcasting and using RSS, has established a presence on Web 2.0 poster-sites MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. While Edwards’ effort is impressive and certainly far-reaching, Romney still trumps him.

Indeed, Romney’s site one grassroots supporter’s blog, “My Man Mitt,” seems to be built from the ground up to incorporate new media with prominent links to RSS feeds, podcast, the ability to share posts on many of the major social news sites, plenty of video, and Technorati links. The campaign team Another supporter has even created a proprietary social networking site called “MittSpaces” which allows supporters to create profiles, post on forums, and even contribute to the Mitt Romney wiki. (UPDATE: It looks like I gave a bit too much credit to Romney’s campaign team, since these new media efforts appear to be strictly grassroots. More in the addendum below. For the record, Romney’s official site can be found here.)

I was also particularly impressed with how Romney responded to a YouTube video from a 1994 debate in which Romney made decidedly non-conservative statements on several issues, which seemed to contradict Romney’s current campaign positions. Soon after the video was posted, the Romney campaign posted video of Mitt interviewing with the Glen and Helen Show podcast, where the video was discussed. There, Romney was able to directly address the video in question in the same venue where he was challenged. What could have resulted in a John Kerry-esque “flip-flopper” meme was nipped in the bud.

While we’re still in the early stages of the U.S. presidential race, other candidates could do a lot worse than to brush up on their new media expertise using the Romney campaign efforts as an example.

(Note: This is not an endorsement of Mitt Romney or any other candidate for president.)

UPDATE: Wade Eyerly, creator of MittSpaces, informs me in the comments that the My Man Mitt blog and MittSpaces are both independent, grassroots efforts, and were not created by the Romney campaign. But while these sites may not be the product of Mitt’s official campaign team, they’re still more complete and use new media tools far more effectively than the efforts of any other candidates’ campaigns or supporters. Are there any other supporters or campaign teams you feel have put forth a superior effort for their candidate? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll spotlight them.

UPDATE 2: AdWeek has an article about the use of new media in the 2008 presidential races.

UPDATE 3: Obama’s in, and he’s got his own social network, as well.