Lieberman's web stratergy or whatever

CT-Sen: Tech vendors turn down Lieberman


by kos
Wed Aug 23, 2006 at 09:13:03 AM PDT

Joe2006.com is still pretty much down, what with the withering hacker attacks that weren't, and the FBI investigation that would smite said hackers that has sort of fizzled out and gone away.

In reality, Lieberman's site went down on Election Day because they had incompetents running it, hosting it on a shared machine with over 70 other sites, unable to deal with the crush of election-day traffic. They played the crash for political effect, but really, it was all just run-of-the-mill incompetence of the kind that marred his entire primary campaign.

Realizing this, Lieberman's campaign is looking for someone to build them a new site. But the search is going poorly.

It seems major Democratic technology groups are turning down Senator Liberman's (Lieberman-CT) offers to provide technology support in his go-it-alone re-election campaign.

First was Blue State Digital. When approached by the Lieberman campaign, their response was "Thank you for your inquiry about Blue State Digital's technology services. Unfortunately, we cannot be of service to the Lieberman campaign. We work exclusively with Democratic candidates."

Many ironies here, folks. First, Blue State Digital does our technical work, and provides our tools for meaningful online participation. That Senator Lieberman's staff didn't know that is another sign of their web-incompetence. Second, it's the Blue State tech team we offered to send them on election day as they cried foul over their website "hack" to anyone with a camera, microphone, or steno notepad.

And after Blue State Digital, Plus Three closed the door as well. In a similar fashion, the company told Senator Lieberman to find another vendor, they too will not work with the Connecticut for Lieberman Party.

I have a source outside of Plus Three that says they were offered $300K to build Lieberman's website. Not chump change, yet Lieberman was still rejected.

I'd be happy to continue to give public kudos to any Democratic firms who reject Lieberman's advances. Just drop me a line.

This was in the comments

I'm from Blue State Digital

-

- and it's more than just the tech stuff that they need.

The request that came in from them through our web site, under the "What kind of services are you interested in" said, "Establishing a better online presence and building online relationships. Please contact ASAP."

We tell people all the time that online you need more than an "if you build it, they will come" mentality. You need to get in the weeds, reach out to people, offer value, meaningful engagement, empowerment, etc.

But in order to do those things effectively, you have to stand for something bigger than just your campaign or organization. That's pretty much the opposite of the Lieberman approach -- it's all about him.

My guess is that they could have a web site as crazy-commercial and produced as Chipotle but it's not going to help the situation any. (Or at least not until Lieberman decides to also have a live streaming video of guacamole-making.)

If you're talking about the future of our party, you should be providing for it

by Joe Rospars

Here's the problem: Dems aren't going to work for him, and more importantly, what he wants is a complete web team and web strategy.

Only problem, the people who can execute that either have jobs or won't work for him. Sure, he can hire Republicans, but their web efforts are far less successful, in both raising money and helping candidates. And of course, it alienates him from other Democrats.

How clueless are they? They went to Lamont's web team.

But it goes beyond that.

They should have had this on board during the primary. Instead, they let their campaign manager contract this out to his friend. A crony hire. Of course, it failed on election day, because it was sharing server space with 70 other sites. In a statewide election.

But because Dan Gerstein is a moron and has alienated much of the blogging community with his slanders on our character, he has no access to the Democratic talent base who could get his ass out of the jam they're in.

They put $300K on the table and were refused outright by two firms. That's a lot of money to say no to. But they did.

So, again, if Dems aren't taking his money for web work, who's going to walk the streets for him? He's wasting money on a 2 minute ad TV buy, which is a mistake of the highest order, instead of trying to build an organization which will get his voters to the polls and get him support on the web.

He needs a competent web team if he's ever going to reach volunteers and he's not anywhere near that.

I laugh when I hear people like tweety say "this will be a close race". Yeah, ok. So who's going to do Lieberman's scut work. He can't even find web help at inflated prices.