SmoothSpan Blog

Twitter is building out their world to support more personality types by adding a cool rich media capability called Twitter Blocks.  Following my Web 2.0 Personality Style Matrix, you can see what it means here:

In the world of features that matter versus those that don’t, think of adding features to bring in new Personality Styles as being like opening up new vertical markets for your software.  It’s a biggie!

Eventually, a robust Web 2.0 effort will need to populate all the key areas of the matrix.  It’s fascinating to watch this happen on something like Fred Thompson’s Web 2.0 bid for the Presidency.  Thanks to Web 2.oh..Really? for putting me on to that story.  Here is what Thompson’s campaign looks like on the Matrix:

Some explanation is in order:

–  Fred Talk Radio and Fred Newspaper are clever tools that tell you for the market you live in what the radio stations and phone numbers are or how to send a letter to the appropriate newspaper editor.

–  FredVision is a photo gallery that flashes you photos at a speed you control.  Not quite as good as a Scoble Kyte broadcast, but cool for an old politico.

–  FredManifesto is as close to Kyte as Fred gets:  a 2 minute video of him giving his vision/manifesto.

Wow!  That’s pretty impressive.  Most of the Global 2000 wish they were executing a web strategy so well.

Where is Fred missing out?  All the boxes with question marks and no blue.

Like many politicos, he fears situations where he loses control.  He doesn’t encourage the Participator so much.  My guess is that despite where he lands in the Matrix, things will be so heavily moderated that your opportunity to participate other than on his behalf is totally foreclosed.

Also, the Interrupted piece is not so strong, despite the title of this post.  This is probably again a control issue.  It is extremely hard to make sure everything is buttoned down, scripted, and on message if you are producing content too rapidly.  Fred has no tweets, in other words.  It’s a pity, because a small staff who had gotten sufficiently ahead of things to provide a buffer (renewed every night) like Talk Radio’s time delay could manage a pretty carefully groomed yet very real time channel.  Perhaps it’ll happen once the campaign heats up and there’s more to talk about.  The thing about the Interrupted sector is that it really seems to apply to Extroverts from the Myers Briggs world and it seems to me having such folks in your camp is extremely helpful to any marketing effort, political or otherwise.

Nevertheless, the web campaign appears to be working extremely well.  No doubt we’ll see a lot of antics across all the candidate’s web sites before it’s all over.  I think it’s great.  The Web 2.0 is all about collaboration.  Anything that gets more people involved in the Democratic Process sounds like collaboration to me, and involvement is a good thing no matter who you prefer to vote for.

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