The team that built the web portal for the Fred Thompson campaign has been engaging in a post-mortem of sorts with a number of great insights.
This post on The Bivings Report discussed the campaign’s blog, The FredFile. It was an effective tool for the campaign, generating a lot of discussion.
First, the blog was built in a real blogging platform, Wordpress (Wordpress Mu specifically). On a lot of political sites you’ll see blogs that are built as an extension of the overall Content Management System. The results is blogs that don’t really look or act like blogs (no RSS feed, no pinging, no plug-ins, no categories, no comments, etc.). Using Wordpress gave us all the functionality we needed out of the box and made it relatively easy to add new features.
Second, in order to post comments users had to create an account using our main volunteer sign up form. There were no anonymous comments and people’s full names appeared next to their words. In addition to that, Turk made the decision early on to force people to have site accounts to even view comments. Due to these decisions, the site had almost no trolls, as you had to be pretty committed to even view the comments, much less post. Forcing people to use their real names creates a sense of accountability in posters, creating a really civil environment. We also included the number of comments a user had made next to their name, which lead people to welcome in newbies and provided a way to reward those who spent lots of time in the comments. The atmosphere was like a comfy neighborhood bar. This is in stark contrast to the comment areas on a lot of campaign and newspaper sites, which come closer to the chaos of Times Square on New Years Eve.
Third, we used a plugin called WP-Sticky to pin important posts to the top of the blog. The intent in installing this was so that we could highlight our more substantive posts (those written by Fred himself or announcements). The unintended consequence was that long discussions would occur around these featured posts, as people just sort of hung out and read and posted comments almost like you see on a message board.
Anyway, the content drove the bus here. But I think these smaller decisions that were made helped create a good environment for the Fredheads and contributed to the success of the Fred File.
Being a Fred Head myself, I wish the campaign could have had as much success offline as it had online, but it’s too late for that.
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