Missed it by this much

The John McCain campaign is trying to engage its supporters to seed social media with its message. It’s absolutely a smart idea. Unfortunately, the execution is suspect.

Blog seeding with authenticity is a serious challenge for anyone with a message, whether it’s commercial in nature or ostensibly for the public good—it’s not easy to promote your product, service, or cause in a way that doesn’t feel troll-ish. Engaging your audience to share your message is a valid strategy. Astroturfing is not.

Seeds and counter-posts must be relevant, as personal as possible, and provide at least some perceived benefit to sites’ hosts and their audiences.

Being blatant about your agenda is a much lesser sin than looking foolish. And, damn, when you ask people who may or may not have any experience in social media to post pre-fab messaging to highly trafficked sites, you’re just asking for trouble. It’s one thing to encourage your constituency to get the word out, and to give them some coaching in what message you’d like them to convey. Publicly encouraging a cut-and-paste mentality is a cynical, incompetent tactic that can only backfire.

That’s why taking a longer-term approach—engaging in conversation and developing cross-chatter, building relationships, and seeding with care—is a much better way to create awareness, drive traffic, create a conversion funnel, and, well, collect votes.