Joe Trippi Does Westminster

Joe Trippi is in London, via the Guardian, spreading his Internet gospel and his optimism that audiences will become wiser consumers:

“We are now moving to a medium where authenticity is king, from what things look like to what’s real … You have to be ‘on’ 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”…Platitudes will simply bore people, but the public will learn to filter out trivial gaffes: voters are unlikely to tolerate evidence of racism, but may learn to accept that senators occasionally drop off in hearings, for example.

But the switch will be particularly hard for incumbents, he suggested, who have to abandon the tactics which have made them successful.

“Parties that have had iron-clad message discipline – in the US, the Republican party and in the UK, Labour – have a tougher time,” he warned.

“Command and control … [is] a disaster in the peer-to-peer social network world.”

BarackObama.com, competition for the John Edwards supporter,  seems to come closest to Trippi’s vision.

(It must be web guru week in London: Dan Gillmor was in town and at the BBC yesterday. Are Jarvis and Weinberger in town, too?)