The recently more Web-savvy John McCain campaign has re-launched its social network – McCainSpace – and it’s actually pretty good. The site is powered by KickApps, and includes standard social networking features like forums, groups, and plenty of user-generated content.
What’s impressive about the new McCainSpace is the viral potential it unleashes for the campaign. For instance, the Groups feature includes a “Hillary Supports for McCain” – which, apparently there are still plenty of according to recent polls. There are also groups for McCain supporters in every state, allowing them to organize and discuss their campaign efforts. Meanwhile, all of the videos users upload are embeddable, meaning they can be spread via blogs and social networks. McCain introduces the social network in the video below:
While the Obama campaign has been largely praised for its use of the Web and has a strong social network of its own (My.BarackObama.com), McCain’s first attempt at online community was not a strong one. I was recently quoted as calling the first version of the site, which launched early this year, “virtually impossible to use and appear[ing] largely abandoned,” which it was.
The new site is extremely easy to use, and includes a lot of social networking best practices like allowing users to sort videos by most viewed, highest rated, and most recent. Of course, a lot of the credit here goes to KickApps, but in order to get there, the McCain camp needed to acknowledge the weakness of the initial site it built in-house.
Beyond the new social network, you might have noticed more McCain videos popping up on YouTube. The Senator has recently been using his channel on the site to spread campaign ads, including the infamous “celebrity” video that drew a response from Paris Hilton. McCain’s sudden surge on the Web is obviously quite timely as he is set to accept his party’s nomination at next week’s Republican National Convention, where he’ll have an enormous platform to promote McCainSpace.
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