Recently, Sen. Chris Dodd's presidential campaign announced the creation of a "social network aggregation" site - one that ostensibly would allow a visitor to browse Dodd's presence on all social networks at once. Using MyLifeBrand, an alpha-stage social network aggregator tool, the team put together a page which is available here. While Read/Write Web is overall positive on the value proposition of MyLifeBrand, Matt Safford of Appscout directs some well-founded criticism at Dodd's implementation.

Safford's criticism, like my own, revolves largely around the usability of the MyLifeBrand experience. To view Dodd's site, one must first register with MyLifeBrand, and then join the Dodd community. Dodd's MyLifeBrand is essentially a collection of iFramed links to his homepage, social networking profiles, and Wikipedia entry. How MyLifeBrand encourages cross-social network information sharing is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Overall, I was disappointed with the experience - though I'm certainly aware it is an alpha.

However, this raises a larger issue, one that campaigns will wrestle with as we progress toward 2008: how does a campaign deal with a multitude of profiles, and is it worth the effort to attempt to unify them? This question deserves serious thought; as campaigns use valuable resources to maintain profiles across many sites, and even build application-specific tools, how do they get the most value out of their efforts?

To frame the discussion, lets look at two different approaches. The first approach is candidate-property-centric; the campaign develops tools and properties and invites the community to take up residence. Barack Obama's my.BarackObama.com property is an example of this approach. The second approach is audience-centric, in which the candidate attempts to engage the audience where they reside - in social networks and other applications. John Edwards' ubiquitous presence in social networking apps is an example of this strategy.

Of course, both of these approaches have limitations, and the two campaigns mentioned actually use a mixture of approaches. However, there's limited data that shows that one approach is better than the other, so what are campaigns to do? In her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum (video), danah boyd talked about candidates meeting their supporters on the digital receiving lines. She advocated that candidates should engage supporters where they reside, be it on blogs, SNS communities, or other places of online social interaction.

The upside of engaging supporters where they reside is simple - there are no switching costs. This is the primary problem with the candidate-centric model. How many websites do you visit daily? Asking someone to visit a new site is difficult enough - expecting them to come back even moreso. By meeting supporters where they reside, there are no switching costs; the challenge on the candidate's side becomes the management of the presence in various contexts.

Of course, this is not to say that candidates should eschew the creation of properties. Candidates will always have websites, and very popular candidates such as Obama can even field a well-used SNS. However, few candidates will share Obama's popularity, so the candidate-centric approach is often complimented by the audience-centric approach.

The approach Dodd takes with MyLifeBrand is a combination approach, and unfortunately it suffers from the downside of both. First, there are significant switching costs in asking the supporters to join "yet another" social network. Second, since this social network only serves to aggregate profiles (as opposed to the much more difficult challenge of making them interoperable), there's little utility gained from the centralized place. Dodd's team might as well simply follow the Edwards approach and create a page of links to the various profiles.

It strikes me that there's a real market for backend tools that make profile management for candidates less challenging. Tools that would enable push-button profile updates across social networks would be useful, though ultimately challenging to maintain. Ultimately, the right social technology strategy will require finesse and a deep understanding of the intended audience. However, by concentrating on meeting supporters where they are, keeping switching costs low, and deploying usable, sensible applications, candidates will be starting off on solid ground.