White House 'Reality Check' site falls short

Curious Americans are turning to the Internet to learn more about health care reform. In the past 90 days, Google searches for keywords like "healthcare reform bill," "House health bill" and "healthcare bill" have risen by more than 5,000 percent. Those words return a plethora of results -- blogs, news organizations, interest groups and government pages -- but if the White House wants to have the authoritative site on the debate, it needs to refine its strategy, experts warn.

For starters, the administration has struggled to debunk misinformation that other groups spread through viral e-mails and campaigns. The White House set up a "Reality Check" site, but it's unlikely you'll end up there after a simple Google search using the most popular health care-related keywords.

"I don't think [the Reality Check site] is really well optimized and is helping the campaign," said Michael Fleischner, an expert on search engine optimization. "If we were to type in the most common terms that people are searching on, we would expect [that site] to come up, and [it's] not coming up."

For WhiteHouse.gov, defining the health care debate paradoxically means starting to speak its language -- the terms and keywords already being used in cyberspace. Google offers several tools, like Google Insights and Google Trends, to help groups and companies improve their SEO strategies by listing the top keyword searches related to a topic. For example, on the health care topic, "health care reform," "health bill," "health care bill" and "Obama care" have topped Google searches in the past 90 days. If the White House wants to use the "Reality Check" site to its full potential, it should be including those terms prominently in the text of the site, SEO expert Steve Wiideman said. Instead, the site uses President Obama's frame, "health insurance reform," for its title.

Obama as a candidate seemed to understand this lesson better than Obama as president. During the campaign, his myth-debunking site, "Fight the Smears," repeated the wording used by rumors that were spreading, then explained the fallacy of the statements. But the "Reality Check" site never repeats the myths verbatim, another fatal error for the White House in its SEO strategy, SEO expert Aaron Wall said.

A search for "death panel," for example, won't bring you to any "Reality Check" page because the phrase isn't used on the site. Repeating the myth "allows you to use the opposite frame without necessarily giving into it," Wall said. "That allows you to not only optimize for your own political frame, but for the competing one." Organizing For America, the Democratic Party's outgrowth of the Obama campaign, launched "Setting The Record Straight," which does use the phrase "death panels" and makes direct mention of Sarah Palin, who is credited with spreading the rumor on her Facebook page. OFA is also running Google ads against keywords like "death panels" and "rationing health care."

Another reason "Reality Check" might be struggling more than its campaign-trail predecessor is the crowd of organizations creating Web sites related to health care reform, Wall said. Many business groups, issue groups and individuals have a stake in the issue, in addition to the normal blogs and news organizations that would create content about any debate.

The White House is also to some degree competing for attention with itself, having created multiple sites related to health care reform, including the Health and Human Services Department's HealthReform.gov and the "Health Care Issues" page on WhiteHouse.gov.

Wall suggested the difference between the campaign site and "Reality Check" may have arisen from Obama's new position. As a candidate, he was fighting for every vote and did everything possible to maximize his online presence, but as president, he may prefer to rise above the fray, Wall said.

Some campaign tactics take on a new tone when run by a sitting president. The notion of asking supporters to "flag" myths as they found them struck many critics a "big brother" tactic, and it was quickly scrapped by WhiteHouse.gov -- even though it was a long-standing practice for the campaign, which asked users to "report a smear" at watchdog@barackobama.com.

Other measures, like providing supporters with a ready-made e-mail that can be sent to friends in response to specific myths, were included on the "Fight the Smears" site but are absent on the "Reality Check" site. Such a strategy could allow individuals to e-mail information directly to friends and family they know are receiving misinformation about health care reform, instead of expecting them to go to a Web site on their own. Media Matters Action Network, a liberal watchdog group, has set up an e-mail checker page that provides easy-to-copy-and-paste text responses to the most popular viral e-mails bashing health care reform.

David Nickerson, a professor at the University of Notre Dame specializing in political behavior, would have expected the White House to utilize a strategy as basic as this one. "The easier you make a transaction, the more likely people are to take advantage of it," he said.