The cyber campaigning begins

John Edwards continued his pre-announcement festivities with a video posted to YouTube yesterday. Wow. It’s pretty amazing how far technological integration in political campaigns has already come since 2004. The most shocking campaign this time around will be the one that doesn’t have a blog.

The Deval Patrick campaign used net video to an excellent extent during this past year’s Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign. The software platform, provided by brightcove, allowed high quality archiving of campaign commercials, speeches, debate appearances, and other miscellaneous materials.

But this was a proprietary system (albeit a proprietary system with some nice RSS and e-mail capabilities). Edwards has gone directly into the frenzy of YouTube, with comments and ratings and related links. The top related video to Edwards’ announcement, which is displayed directly to the right of the video and also shows up right after you’re done watching the video, is to Wal-Mart attacks John Edwards, a CNN capture about a mini-controversy that happened to Edwards back in November. Now, this was generally negative press, though nothing too bad, but what about when a viewer watches a candidate-sanctioned video and is then linked to a Swift Boat “documentary” immediately afterwards? And the comments being posted?

I’m glad to see someone still exploiting the Katrina tragedy for their own gain. I’m sure the people in N.O. miss all the celebrities “helping” them out down there.

Ouch. With the viral popularity that YouTube can offer, there can be a lot of strings attached. I’d expect most big 2008 campaigns to mainly use a brightcove like proprietary system, with occasional forays into the more scary viral world.

Not that proprietary is necessarily a bad thing - I’d like to see a campaign use one of these platforms to establish an incredibly thorough library of video on a candidate. Every campaign stop, every TV appearance, every press conference. Transparency is accessibility, and accessibility is grassroots, and as much as some people may be skeptical of the grassroots idea after Howard Dean’s spectacular flameout in 2004, it is an incredibly intoxicating idea, and incredibly potent in the right hands.

One other quick prediction: this upcoming campaign will, and must, feature the birth of a hugely popular political video blog.  The market for this is tremendous, and something as quick moving, complex, particular and high profile as a presidential race is the perfect platform for it.  2008 will be for political (and consequently, general) blogs what 2004 was for text blogs.