Republican online media strategist David All recently gave a PowerPoint presentation to a group of young conservatives at the Leadership Institute regarding the importance of having an online presence. I hope they paid attention because conservatives are behind in this area.

While this issue has been a frequent subject of discussion lately, I feel that one problem is almost always overlooked. As I have observed for a while, far too many conservatives tend to treat different internet technologies like a child who just got a new toy. They can’t wait to show them off to everyone (look, look at me, I have a Twitter account AND Facebook!!!111). Often times tools like MySpace and Facebook are viewed by conservatives as more of an end instead of a means to an end. Many seem to feel that they only need to have accounts on different sites and that’s it, nothing more. I see this a lot with Twitter. I can’t begin to recall how many times I’ve heard people say “everyone should get a Twitter account, it’s a great technology.” Perhaps for some, but simply having a Twitter account is rather useless unless you’re sending updates to a large blog or something similar.

Overall, each technology needs to be evaluated in terms of how it can further one’s objectives and subsequently used for those specific purposes. Take Facebook for example. Creating a Facebook group for an organization or website is a great way to expand a member base. In addition, it’s an excellent way to keep people up-to-date with current information via mass messaging (provided that your Facebook group has less than 1,000 members) and posts on the group’s discussion board. However, Facebook requires a good amount of time and strategic action to be a successful tool. I have a Facebook group with close to 20,000 members and it took me a lot of time and work to get that many. Simply making a profile/group with no further interaction will get you nowhere.

When conservatives begin to treat the different internet technologies as familiar tools and properly use them to achieve specific results, then we’ll start to see a more effective conservative online presence. Until then, getting googly-eyed over simply having accounts on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter isn’t going to cut it. In addition, the strategy of hiding from the rest of the internet world by making sites like QubeTV and Conservapedia is another poor choice. However, that’s a different discussion for another day.