Jon Henke: It takes real interaction to make it work

Jon makes a point at the end of this article that is both fundamental and wholly misunderstood by people who run traditional campaigns: it takes real people communicating with real people to make online communication effective. I've added the emphasis below:

Know It All - - Rebranding via Blogging: "Large organizations like to adopt best practices that can be used by anybody, but a lot of things that are effective online are not easily duplicated - the natural interaction, the person-to-person communication. Campaigns tend to want templates and data dumps. If the vision is spamming people with press releases, it will have the appearance of what works, but it won't work. People have the idea you can push a button to say 'make it viral,' but you have to provide something of value to the people you want involved - prestige, traffic, ideological progress - and in an attention economy, you have to get it to them quickly. That way, they'll push it to the audience you want to reach. That's what makes the Internet a social medium, they get value from distributing it."