Internet professionals: Get 5 tips from Clinton and Obama!

The US presidential elections are dominating the media these months. Research by E-marketer shows that this year, approx. 24% of all American adults will check the internet for information on the presidential campaign. This made me wonder how the democratic candidates use their website and the internet in general to communicate with their grassroots. Who will win the online campaign, Clinton or Obama?

In this article we will take you through the websites of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. For internet professionals, visiting these websites can be an extremely inspiring experience. Like many other American things, these websites are big and overwhelming. Based on these websites we provide you with 5 tips….

The homepages:

www.barackobama.com     

www.hillaryclinton.com

1. Always have a “big red fez”

In 2001, usability guru Seth Godin published the book ‘the big red fez’. The idea is as simple as useful: each webpage should contain a clear call-for-action. An eye-catching starting point for visitors. Obama and Clinton’s websites comply with this golden e-commerce rule. Both websites contain large fat red buttons: ‘donate now’ , ‘click here to get started’, or ‘contribute’ (see homepages above). It seems that both Clinton and Obama have Godin’s book on their bedside table.

 
Barack Obama

 
Hillary Clinton

Lesson learnt:It is extremely important to offer your visitors a clear starting point, especially on commercial websites, where the main call-for-action often is ‘order now’. But even on more informative websites, it can be useful to offer visitors a clear starting-point

Score so far: Clinton vs Obama: 1 - 1

2. Engage visitors

Barack and Hillary have thought about the actions they want their website visitors to take. Both campaign sites clearly try to get the visitors into action. At the right-hand side of Hillary’s homepage, it is extremely clear that visitors can do 5 things. Obama’s website shows 4 ways to ‘make a difference’.

Hillary Clinton                                        Barack Obama

Lesson learnt:
Consider how you want to engage visitors on your website. Once you’ve identified what you want your visitors to do, enable them to take those actions as easily as possible, just as on the websites of Hillary and Barack do (‘5 things you can do’, ‘make a difference’).

Score so far: Clinton vs Obama: 2 - 2

3. Write for the web:

 “People do not read online”. This should be the first lesson of every writing for the web course. Obama shows how effective a fixed template is when communicating online.

What do Clinton and Obama do?Both Clinton and Obama have a section called ‘Issues’, giving a long list of political issues. When clicking on a single issue on Obama’s website, a webpage appears, discussing the issue in detail, and in a fixed template:

• Quote (an interesting quote from Obama, summarising the issue and Obama’s vision)
• Video (optional)
• The problem
• Barack Obama’s plan
• Barack Obama’s record

Obama also complies with important rules for writing for the web, using clear sub-headers, bullets, short paragraphs and highlighting important words. A clear-cut example of how to communicate issues and solutions on a website.

Hillary, on the other hand shows that is hard to “grasp the message” when a fixed template is lacking .
Hillary’s issue specific webpages are less-structured (do not use sub-headers, bullets) and therefore less informative and convincing.

Lesson learnt:
A clear-cut structure is extremely important when communicating online. These examples from Clinton and Obama show that ‘grasping the message’ is so much easier with a fixed (and recognisable) template. Using fixed templates can be extremely useful for: case studies, testimonials, product pages, etc.

And, Obama takes the lead against Hillary: Clinton vs Obama: 2 – 3

4. Be everywhere:

The internet does not stop with having a website. There is so much more to do online. Clinton and Obama seem to have understood this quite well. Both have accounts on all the well-known social networks: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. When looking at the figures, Obama seems to have put more effort in it (more YouTube videos, more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter, etc.). An interesting - but maybe not very surprising - finding is that Obama also looks after the traditional ‘minority groups’ in the US. He has accounts on several online ‘minority’ social networks, such as :

• MiGente.com (for Spanish people)
• Blackplanet.com (name speaks for itself)
• AsianAve.com (name also speaks for itself)

The potential benefits for Obama are not fully observable yet (at the time of writing this article, he is slightly in front). But, it would not surprise me if minority groups, that might have lost their faith in politics and Washington over the last decades, are re-engaged by Obama’s social networking activities.

Lesson learnt:
The internet does not stop at your website. Go out and discover the possibilities of social networks.

Obama wins (4-2)
After having visited both websites, I conclude that both candidates have clearly thought about how to use the web in their campaign. But, Obama’s team has been able to fine-tune things better. Therefore, I announce Obama as the winner of the online campaign!

5. Visit the websites yourself:

I could write much more about both websites, but  I actually recommend you to visit both websites yourselves and get inspired by the way they use the web, be it from a communications, a design, a social networking or a marketing perspective!

Visit:

• Barack Obama at www.barackobama.com
• Hillary Clinton at www.hillaryclinton.com

Or for the republican candidate:

• John McCain at www.johnmccain.com

Additional information:

• E-marketer: “Political Sites Are Hot”