The National Republican Congressional Committee is going for Internet lols. The organization is relaunching its website, and aims to model it after Internet media giant BuzzFeed -- complete with animated gifs, cute animals, lists and all.
The site has already added "13 Animals That Are Really Bummed on Obamacare's Third Birthday" and meme-like images on its Facebook page, such as this one:
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"BuzzFeed's eating everyone's lunch," NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing told the National Journal. "They're making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way."
The National Journal's Brian Fung reports:
The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed's site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media -- but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site's sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC's redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts.
Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.
As the GOP, the arguably less-Internet savvy party, attempts to copy BuzzFeed's formula for success, let's just hope that none of its writers come from conservative-leaning Fox News Magazine; people will start sharing the GOP's listicles for the lulz, not the lols.
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