Branding a Blogette

Go right now and read this profile in Slate of Meghan McCain.

A few weeks back I posted about an old GQ profile of Meghan that portrayed her as nothing less than a ditz with a famous dad. I wondered at the time whether the reporter played Meghan to get her to open-up for a sleazy hit-piece, or McCain played the reporter in a brilliant move to brand herself. Well, the slate piece thinks its the latter, and dissects the brand that Meghan McCain has built bit by bit, blog post by blog post. Whether you are a blogger out to build a brand, or an organization looking to manage your image in the media, it's really worth a read.

Here's a bit about Meghan doing her own rapid response to her gaffe about veterans on The View:

Responding to a question about Barack Obama saying her father "doesn't get it," she rambled her way through talking points into a disastrous sound bite: "No one knows what war is like other than my family. Period."

The misstep was, of course, perfect fodder for the lefty blogosphere. But the real danger to the campaign was that voters on the right might construe Meghan's remark as evidence that the McCain campaign doesn't value the contributions of average soldiers nearly enough. And so Meghan quickly went to her own blog and clarified her statement. Next, she uploaded a YouTube video of an amputee veteran saying that Obama's stance on the Iraq war disrespects the sacrifice that soldiers have made, and that McCain understands all that they've given for their country and for the Iraqi people. The video says what Meghan should have said in that interview, and it's visually arresting and has a soundtrack. In all, it was a wisely calculated response—and a far more typically shrewd Meghan McCain move than the earlier gaffe.

And here's a few graphs that get to the meat of the piece:

If some of the snippets seem to signal ditz, the big picture is a smartly composed one. Meghan is an Ivy League grad who interned at Newsweek and Saturday Night Live, and she has constructed an image that jibes precisely with one expectation of 23-year-old women. She's often compared somewhat unfavorably with 28-year-old Chelsea Clinton, who has in spades the gravitas that Meghan seems to lack. The two are on opposite ends of a mini-generation gap. At Stanford, Chelsea was largely able to escape from the press. Most of Meghan's time at Columbia took place in the Facebook era, when politician's children's pages were suddenly fair game. Seriousness was rewarded for Chelsea and her cohort. But it's been attention-grabbing that has thus far been rewarded for younger women like Meghan—and me—who've grown up in a post-YouTube, post-Britney era. We've been shown that it pays to behave like permanent teenagers, and Meghan has slickly figured out a way to get the most out of this. She calls her blog a Blogette. She writes a book that's aimed at no one who's old enough to vote.

And her confessional style is one whose most devoted practitioners may be middle-school girls with MySpace and Blogger accounts. Meghan tells People about what it was like for her when her mom was addicted to pills, or Meredith Viera that her dad dated a stripper, or confesses that she's gained weight on the trail. People will point these things out anyway, so why not pre-empt them, and in the process, make them feel at ease? As we've seen recently with the Palin family, there's a strong appetite for "Political Stars, They're Just Like Us!"

It's not a substitute for real outreach to youth, but as a piece of communications work, it's brilliant. Meghan McCain is creating a space where she is both hiding her own political views (and likely political acumen) to create a persona that appeals to everyday young girls/women with whom her father's campaign likely has trouble. Now I just wonder what her traffic is like.