Can a new website bring a political party back to national competitiveness?
The Republican Party hopes so, as it launched a revamped website today aimed at making the party more accessible (read: "viral"?) through social networking utilities. The new GOP.com features an embedded, widgetized version of the party's Facebook page. It also cleverly asks if you want to sign in using your Facebook credentials (email and password)...at which point the site synchronizes itself with your Facebook account.
Users can let the site push status updates through their Twitter,
Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts., and the party hopes its new site will
become a social networking tool in itself: beyond those sharing
capabilities, the site will run Facebook-style applications built by
coders and software engineers from home.Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to run too well on the new Internet Explorer. (UPDATE: Seems to be running fine on Internet Explorer now. Upon earlier loadings, portions of the site were missing; now they show up.)
In 2008, Democrats took the lead in using online tools to generate
campaign activity, but Republicans aren't so un-savvy across the board: GOP
lawmakers were the first to put Twitter to work during the 2008 energy
debate, when they stayed in DC to occupy the House floor as everyone else had left for August, tweeting their dissent under the #dontgo hashtag.
New media was also part of Chairman Michael Steele's promise as incoming chairman, so the new site could be something of a signature move for him. If there's any doubt, watch what happens when you open the site for the first time: Steele actually walks out across the page and personally introduces the "forward-looking, open platform for the party of new ideas."
Name one idea Michael Steele.
They appear to be using Wordpress, which isn't exactly known for its secure code. And, they appear to be running on Windows, rather than the better Unix. And, they can't even keep up with spikes in traffic, showing a failure to plan ahead. None of those say much about their technical acumen; did the GOP develop this in house or did they farm it out to a GOP "tech whiz"?
Of course, based on the general incompetence of the GOP leadership (broadly defined) none of this should be much of a surprise.
Chris asked a question - Can a new website bring a political party back to national competitiveness? All the experts I've talked to and everything I've read in my gut says....yes.