I’ve just been collating, sorry, making a mashup of the predictions some of our friends made when Mat asked them to predict the digital comings and goings of 2007. One fairly obvious trend was the ever-increasing use of digital social networks by politicians, particularly in the up-coming US Presidential elections. And, sure enough, there’s not a candidate for the Democratic or Republican party nomination that doesn’t have a myspace page, a herd of bloggers, and a flickr set-up tagged almost entirely with the words ‘babies’ and ‘kissing’. Yet for one candidate, John Edwards (whom eagle-brained readers will perhaps recall from his amusingly DOOMED attempt to become John Kerry’s Vice President way back in 2004) the whole digital social media, web2.0, facetubes and youspaces thing hasn’t quite been going according to plan. Find out why after the jump…
Things did not begin well when he had to sack one of his official campaign bloggers because she not only seemed to hate Catholics, but actually blogged about it in the past. Now, sure, this may well have abeen a right-wing smear campaign, but to me it just indicates that the Edwards campaign didn’t really understand one of the primary rules of using digital social media: everything you write in your corporate blog will one day come back to bite you in the highly-paid consultancy.
And now, snarkarific politics gossip site, Wonkette, proves that the Edwards campaign really is pretty clueless about digital media. This, apparently, is Edwards’s Second Life Headquarters, or his ‘sad, lonely, cyberworld‘ as they put it
It’s the digital manifestation of the urban myth of the English judge being told that the Beatles are a ‘popular beat combo, your honour’ all over again…
