As I watched the online chatter surrounding the announcement that President Obama, the most social media friendly President in history, was nominating Elena Kagan to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, I couldn't help but think, "he's blowing it."
Why would I think that? Let me show you a few screenshots and you decide if our social media friendly President is missing the boat on this one.
First, I Googled "obama supreme court nominees" and look what I
found or maybe didn't find in the Google Results. The only Obama managed
site in the list is on the Sponsored Results list. That's right - in
order to put his voice into the conversation, he bought an ad. So I
clicked on the ad thinking that I'd at least be transported to a dedicated page
the Obama team had created to help sell Elena Kagan to the public.
So you cam imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link and was transported to this page. Where is the information on Elena Kagan's judicial background, her past judicial qualifications, her past judicial points of view? Where are her public statements on key issues like abortion, government vs state powers, or any of a host of issues that will certainly confront her during her confirmation hearings? But wait, it gets better. For fun I clicked on the Facebook share button and check out what happens.
I mean, did they not see the whole Chevy Tahoe build your own TV spot debacle? But more importantly, where is the information and why isn't it on this site? For instance, if you go to the White House Blog, you find a pretty thorough blog post complete with video announcing the nominee of Elena Kagan. So it isn't like they don't have the content, they're just missing the opportunity to seed it with the public via their microsite or via an aggressive link building campaign so they try to compete for page one of Google. I also found it quite interesting that a mere 22 minutes after the Kagan post was published, the White House pushed a second blog post covering the President's commencement address at Hampton University on Sunday. Why would I consider this an "issue"? Because it pushes the big story below the fold and anyone that is pushing a link to the home page of the blog is actually pushing a commencement address story vs the big story of the day, the Kagan nomination. Is that smart?
I'm scratching my head at why the Google Ad Word ad isn't point folks to the Organizing for America site, where there is just a ton more information and a prominent "ad" for supporting Kagan, which takes you to the same Kagan for Justice page shown above. NOTE: in the short time since I started writing this post, they have already added information to the home page... not much but at least they're starting to try and frame her nomination. See below.
The second thing I did was what any blogger wanting to write a pro or con post about the nomination would do, I started searching for pictures, video and any content I could link to or use in the creation of my post. And here again, I was a bit surprised that our social media savvy President misses an opportunity.
Check out the pictures on page one of a Google search for Elana Kagan. Not exactly press kit material. In this day and age, wouldn't it make sense to pre-populate this search with really great photos of Ms. Kagan. Maybe even multiple shots of her from a major event or something so that the first page of results is dominated by the image you want of your nominee vs the image that Sulekha.com likes. Wouldn't this fall under PR2.0 tactics?
By now, I've figured out that the team Obama doesn't seem to be really working the SocMe angle on this one. Why do I believe this? Well check out what the blogosphere was saying about the nomination?
Within less than 24 hours President Obama's nominee was the Gay Nominee. And in this Washington Post article, you see that most of the attributions are made to blogs. And what was the White House's response -- they gave the rumor legitimacy by condemning it and asking for the post to be pulled. So now, if you do a quick Google search on Elena Kagan Gay you get this. I visited some 20 posts listed in the Google results and two things stand out. 1) There is no one out there trying to manage the conversation or guide it back to a productive place and 2) people with an agenda are jumping all over the gay angle.
Then, I checked both President Obama's official twitter feed and the White House's feed -- and sadly, nothing there. More sadly, no real history of anything being there (conversation wise) but that is another post entirely. Here the President's team has almost 4 million people following and nothing, not one peep or attempt to manage the event. Seems like a big miss to me.
And lastly, something that truly blew me away and would sadden the likes of DJ Waldow, I didn't get an email. I mean, Team Obama emails you about everything. Every major piece of legislation, every major move, every major issue gets and email. But today -- nothing. Big, huge miss IMHO.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. We live in a social media, easy to share information, find it on Google kind of world. But Team Obama, which used digital conversations masterfully to get elected, seems to have forgotten the playbook or at least misplaced it.
What do you think?
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