In September 2003, BlogCorp founder Cameron Barrett joined the Wesley Clark for President campaign in Little Rock , AR. On 24 hours notice, he packed his bags and drove non-stop from NYC to Little Rock and less than 72 hours later had launched a brand new web site for the campaign.
While at the Clark campaign, Cameron conceived, designed and developed the revolutionary online community called the Clark Community Network - an online community that gave every supporter of the campaign their own blog. The uniqueness of this initiative, which truly brought politics back to the people, was covered by USA Today and the Associated Press.
The success of this initiative was not lost after Clark dropped out of the race in February 2004. After the community self-managed itself for over a year, Clark's political action committee adopted the site and continues to embrace the online community today.
What We Were Hired To Do
The Clark campaign tapped our expertise in building blogs and online community, by hiring Cameron Barrett, a pioneer in the space.
What Was the Problem to Solve
Famous politician Tip O'Neill once said that "all politics is local." With the Clark Community Network we took this concept one step further and created an online local political network made up of supporters who identified with each other not only geographically but of attributes as well. For instance, one of the most popular and effective Clark communities was called "Bark for Clark" a group of individuals who identified with each other because they all supported Clark and they all owned dogs.
What Happened When You Solved the Problem
Launched in late October 2003, the Clark Community Network quickly grew to over 10,000 individual blogs from over 15,000 registered users. Combined, they created over 22,000 blog posts and almost 800,000 comments.
What Lessons Were Learned
We quickly learned that every community, no matter how large or small needs leadership and management, less it spiral out of control and get hijacked by those individuals whose only purpose was to create discontent and trouble.
By putting into place tools and processes that allowed the community itself to self-regulate themselves, we successfully avoided having to hire a lot of staff members to moderate the blog community. By putting our trust in the community itself, we earned their trust and respect back and created even more loyal and passionate supporters for the campaign. This concept is similar to how brand loyalists feel about the products they love and the companies that make them.
Technologies Used & Other Project Information:
| Blog/Community Platform: | Scoop (open source) |
| Production: | Cameron Barrett |
| Design: | Cameron Barrett |
| Development: | Cameron Barrett |
| Server Type: | Linux-based |
| Database: | MySQL |