breitbart.com
It's just one week into Hillary Clinton's presidential run, and already toes are getting trampled in the blogosphere. MediaPost reports that the Clinton camp leapt into hot water last week after it purchased an initial round of BlogAd placements to promote Clinton's podcast series. The ads ran on a wide range of political sites, from liberal to staunchly conservative blogs like Powerline and HughHewitt.com. Following the podcasts, the campaign requested that all right-wing bloggers remove the ads but promised to continue paying for the ad space, effectively paying conservative bloggers not to run Clinton's ads while at the same time upping their advertising on left-wing sites. The move managed to upset bloggers on all sides, liberal and conservative alike. Leftist blogger Matt Stoller of MyDD.com wrote of the decision to run ads on Republican sites, "Why do people like [Clinton], no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?" while liberal blogger Taylor Marsh complained that the campaign had unfairly limited the blogs on which they chose to run ads and ignored "smaller business blogs" like hers in favor of the blogosphere's "heavy hitters" (a decision that wasn't shared, as Marsh pointed out, by Democratic rival John Edwards' camp, which bought ad space on a number of smaller sole-proprietor blogs).
That campaigns are focusing so much so early on Internet advertising speaks volumes about the importance of effective web use in the upcoming election (a theme personified, of course, by the decision of both democratic front-runners to announce their candidacy online). Still, as the Clinton campaign has yet to fully discover, the blogosphere is its own animal, a micro-civilization teeming with internal politics, power squabbles and an ever-changing code of cyber-etiquette that won't bend regardless of your status as a potential presidential nominee. That a mere BlogAds first buy should produce instant digital uproar is proof in the pudding. For a candidate who has created a science out of never taking a step or uttering a word without a meticulously-planned trajectory, cyberspace presents a tricky delve into the often unpredictable and, even worse, uncontrollable. And with plenty of time left to go in the Democratic race, there's little doubt the Clinton camp will find plenty of new ways to agitate bloggers across the political spectrum (and even less doubt that said bloggers won't hesitate to express their ire every step of the way).
Update: According to Blog PI, Clinton's initial round of blogads was an invitation to "join the conversation" with her live video webcasts. Following the webcasts' completion, the ads switched to an invitation to submit a blog post. The two ads were placed on different sets of blogs, with some overlap, and some blogs were paid for the week according to custom, though the promoted event ended several days earlier.
