Rather than expecting a Web site to be a destination all by itself, the [Presidential] candidates are employing what I call the "starfish" approach. A starfish has many legs radiating outward from its central core. It uses its legs to move toward its prey, which it will ultimately devour with one of its stomachs. The analogy should be clear. Social media--blogs, text messaging, video, and social networking--are the legs of your online strategy. Your Web site is the belly of the beast, where you convert visitors into customers.

—Robert Scoble in Stars, Stripes and Social Media

• What you can learn from the presidential candidates and their Web strategies.
• Being a political starfish video interview with Robert Scoble.

Scoble's point here is strongly made: for an organization to contend they need to employ as many of social networking tools as they can to pull people into their site. People who have a sense of involvement tend to do things to support the object of their interest.

It's important to realize that you can't fake involvement. If your message is dull, uninteresting and more than anything else not particularly useful then no amount of podcasts or facebook pages are going to do much to move your product or service. Indeed, they could just blow up in your face.

In traditional marketing we talk about the value proposition, "why do you want to buy this product?" Do that well and you see conversion into sales. For Internet marketing we need to think in terms of value exchange, "Here's what we have for you." Do that well and you see conversion into regular users of your site: sales come later.

Another way of looking at this is to consider your site as a giant lever. You need viewers one end of it in order to lift the value proposition at the other end of it. The fulcrum is the value exchange.

Canada NewsWire (CNW) gives us a good example of a lever in action. One of their website's tools is a subscriber defined newslist that send news releases directly to the subscriber. In 2001 over 65,000 Canadians subscribed to this free service. Immediate access to news on topics of concern to their subscribers gave CNW a giant market advantage over their competitors which in no small way contributes to the continuing dominance and growing market share of CNW in Canada's news release distribution world.

Effective sites just don't happen. A strategy of involving viewers, leading them to your site in a variety of ways, and providing meaningful content are key components to success.