In the interest of full disclosure, MMS does not have a client in the race.

While there is still plenty of time for more candidates to jump in, the two “big” candidates known to be running are businessman A.J. McCall, whose multi-generational family-owned furniture and appliance business (D.T. McCall’s) has him on TV in commercials with regularity, and state Rep. Susan Lynn.

Lynn became the first candidate with a website up this week with the launch of SusanLynn.net.

The site is, to be charitable, a design mess, a mishmash of fonts and colors and low-quality clip-art graphics that appear to be salvaged from the wreckage of mid-1990s web design. The “Susan Lynn for State Senate 2010″ banner takes up far too much real estate on the home page, pushing the interesting content down and forcing readers to scroll to find it. And when they do find it…

Functionally, the site is worse. Most of the necessary pieces seem to be there, but it seems obvious that the site was cobbled together by someone who doesn’t understand how to use the internet and social media in a political campaign.

Here are my comments regarding the site:

1. The “Newsletter” link takes readers to a page where they can read old weekly newsletters sent out by the candidate’s state House office – the newsletters can be downloaded as .jpg image files rather than the more common, standard and easily printable PDF. The site should have NEW news, related to the campaign.

2. The “Rumor Mill” feature – designed to respond to rumors and attacks – is a good idea, but the section ought to be a part of the campaign website rather than hosted on a separate blog site, and should share the same design and colors as the main site. The “Blog” link also goes off-site, to the candidate’s pre-existing blog. While MMS would prefer not to have readers leave your site to read your blog, the fact that the blog existed before the campaign site makes this situation understandable.

MMS recently built a site for another state representative running for state senate in a different district, a lawmaker with a pre-existing blog. Rather than just add a link to the candidate’s pre-existing blog, we built the site to automatically pull the latest headlines from the blog and post them to the campaign site in a prominent position, so that the campaign site is updated with fresh content whenever the lawmaker/candidate posts to his blog.

3. The next feature – the “Volunteer” page is actually pretty good. Simple, easy to understand, and meant to give supporters an easy way to get involved in the campaign. Ditto the “Yard Sign” request page – well done.

4. The lists of “Campaign News” and “General Assembly News” headlines are useless. Web readers expect headlines to be hyperlinks to click to read the whole story. The headlines in this campaign site are just text. They go nowhere, and provide too little information.

5. The “Donate” link takes the reader straight to the campaign’s PayPal page – without collecting information required by state campaign donations regulations and without explaining state campaign donation limits. MMS recently completed a site for another candidate for the Tennessee state Senate in a different district who also uses PayPal to collect online contributions, and created a way to handle those two important informational tasks.

6. In terms of social media, the site’s “Facebook” link goes to Facebook’s home page, not to the campaign or candidate’s specific Facebook page. There’s no Twitter link, no YouTube channel, and no use of or apparent provision for future use of video and/or podcasting.

7. The site is not optimized for viewing and use on mobile devices such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

8. And, finally, a major weakness of the site is that it incorporates too much of the candidate’s state legislative content, as if it was meant to be a lawmaker’s constituent-service website rather than a tool for winning a campaign. Contact information is provided for both the campaign and the lawmaker’s General Assembly office. The result is information overload and a lack of focus on the goal. An incumbent lawmaker running for re-election or for another office needs two sites – and the two sites should overlap only minimally, with a single link from the campaign site to the incumbent-lawmaker site as part of the candidate’s bio page. Contact information should be given for the campaign only.

The web and social media are tools of great potential and power for politics and campaigns. This campaign site has left most of that potential and power untapped. The good news: The primary election is more than 11 months away. There’s still time to fix it.

If you’re considering running for the state legislature in your state* and you want a high-quality website that leverages the potential and power but are afraid it costs too much, please contact MMS. We have built websites for state legislative candidates in two election cycles, and we are working on ways to bring down the cost of campaign sites for state legislative candidates while raising their quality and effectiveness.

If you are running to win, you can’t afford not to have a great website.

* MMS only works for mainstream conservative Republican candidates.

What we do know here in mid-2009 is that a lot of what we believed just three years ago about what “works” in politics was wrong. If political conventional wisdom circa 2006 had been right, a backbench senator of no significant professional accomplishment in or outside of politics, running on little more than a couple of vapid slogans seemingly borrowed from a network marketing convention session would not have won the Democratic presidential nomination, much less the White House, in 2008.

But Barack Obama upended conventional wisdom, leveraging the Internet and social media to win the presidency. Through social networking platforms, text messaging and other such tools, Obama sold himself to a slim majority of the American people much like Mary Kay’s network marketing reps sell cosmetics by pushing hopes and dreams.

Sarah Palin’s risky move is no more risky than a first-term U.S. Senator of thin resume declaring his candidacy for the presidency almost before he unpacked his bags upon arriving in Washington DC for the first time. She has the same social media tools Obama had. She has a passionate following in her party. She has name recognition. And, soon, the freedom to travel the country raising funds in eye-popping amounts for Republican candidates and organizations and allies, building offline connections while using the social media to both raise money and build connections online.

Will it work for her?

Conventional wisdom said Obama couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton and win the White House, so Obama ran unconventionally, and won.

Conventional wisdom has said a governor of a faraway state like Alaska could not win the White House for many reasons, including the very practical problem of being too far away to do much campaigning in the lower 48 without being criticized for not being at home doing her job. Palin has just solved that problem. And her rapid response on Twitter and Facebook to the criticism leveled at her in recent days shows she gets how to use the social media to impact and drive news coverage.

Where will the story end? I don’t know – but it’s going to be fun to watch.

7/7/09 Update: The Washington Post takes a look at Palin’s online army.

Twitter would seem to have potential for fund-raising due to its rapid growth, popularity and viral nature, especially if including as part of a broader social networking and media relations strategy.

The new resource from the online video sharing site “will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting,” says TechCrunch.

What does this mean for the media relations efforts for your business, organization, church or campaign?  The YouTube Reporters’ Center is just the latest in the ongoing trend of decentralizing and democratizing the creation and distribution of information. A press release to the local media just isn’t going to get the job done as effectively now or in the future as it did in the past. Many of your current or future customers, supporters, donors, members or voters are going to be too busy creating content to spend time watching or reading what we traditionally think of as “the news.”

You need your story, your message, your presence to be where they are, not where they are not.