How can politicians use online video to reach voters? Not by using it as a platform for traditional political message, argued Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum.

Speaking at the Knight New Media Center seminar on Election ’08, Sifry contrasted the approaches of Hillary Clinton to UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron.

In his view, the Clinton campaign is using online video as it would be conventional TV – as a way of having the candidate talk at voters in a formal and scripted fashion.

Cameron, by comparison, has adopted a more informal approach. I doubt his video blog entries are totally unscripted, but they do come across as more relaxed.

But the key difference, argued Sifry, is that Cameron asks for questions from the public and then tries to answer then in video. And if there are follow-up questions, he tries to answer those too.

This is a fundamentally different to Clinton’s approach. According to Sifry, online video enables candidates to engage in a conversation with voters, but few campaign managers have realised this. Instead they are approach online video as they do TV – as a one-way, top-down channel.

And this is possible because the internet offers a world of abundance, says Sifry. Candidates can provide as many videos as they want. Or offer videos made by supporters, as Barack Obama is doing.

The key thing here is realising that online video is a different beast to TV. But that few presidential campaigns have yet to tape into its power.

UPDATE: For a comprehensive guide to presidential campaign videos, head over to this great posting by PBS’s Mark Glaser.