An Obama Promise Broken Already?
January 21, 2009 by ShannonCherry
Filed under Marketing
I was excited when the President’s new administration announced that their website Http://www.whitehouse.gov would play a big role. Here’s what it said:
One of the first changes is the White House’s new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.
Awesome!
They’ve also opened the site up to search engines, for the very first time. Great step!
They promise more communication, transparency and participation. Sounds good, but their blog is not open for comments.
That’s right. Although you can fill out a form, commenting on their blog isn’t available.
Communication and participation is a dialogue, not a monologue. Although it may seem like a petty gripe with all the big issues the new administration has to deal with, from a public relations standpoint, this may backfire on them.
Sure, I know it takes a lot of time to weed through comments, after all I write and manage three blogs. But it’s not like they aren’t already getting tons of email and letters, and someone (or many) are on top of that!
What do you think? Should the blog be open to comments?
image credit: aturkus, on Flickr
Hi Shannon,
I guess the real test of the new administration is not whether they get it all right straight away, but rather whether they respond to suggestions that are given to them through the form on the site……maybe if hundreds and thousands of people put forward that suggestion then things would change – power of the people and all that.
I’ll look forward to seeing if it works.
Thanks for the post
Kirsty.
Take a look at my blog: http://www.blog.write-works.com
No, it probably shouldn’t be open, since it would have 40,000 negative posts (or glowing ones) every day, and it would be impossible for them, or the readers, to plow through them all.
Even fictional government-focused blogs do not have a great history. Remember the West Wing’s “LemonLyman.com” blog? Disaster.
Obama’s administration should, and probably will, tread very carefully.
Then again, they have an official Twitter account (which they just took over from the Bush folks on Tuesday): http://twitter.com/thewhitehouse