While his campaign managed their Internet activities almost flawlessly, now that Barack Obama’s in the White House his team’s stumbling a bit on the Web.  Their most recent blunder:

The “Reality Check” Web site that’s been set up to debunk myths about health care legislation, an example of how wrong things can go if you try to sell something on the Web without following some basic site design principles.

From recent reports, the site needs help. A lot of it. And any business with thoughts of promoting its products or services would do well to take a few lessons from this poor example.

Beth Sussman from the National Journal reports that plenty of Americans are using the Web to find out more about health care reform efforts.  In fact, in the past three months,  Google searches for keywords like “healthcare reform bill,” “House health bill” and “healthcare bill” have risen by more than 5,000%.

But while opponents of reform have flooded the Internet with sites promoting their opposition and accusations about current congressional bills, the White House site set up to challenge misinformation or outright lies hasn’t been optimized properly to show up when people do their searches.

It’s  unlikely you’ll end up there after a simple Google search using the most popular health care-related keywords.

What should the site’s managers be doing? For starters, they need to prominently use the most common search phrases in text on the site.

Of course, this tactic runs counter to what many communications advisers might tell them to do. One of the cardinal rules of corporate public relations is never repeat an offensive label or charge.

For example, the Obama folks probably don’t want to perpetuate the life of the phrase “death panels.”

But in their online effort to debunk the myth that these panels are part of the pending legislation, they’ll need to use the phrase often enough so that folks searching for info on the topic will hit on their site early and often.

Another problem for the “Reality Check” site: The government has too many other sites on the topic of health care. These sites are direct competitors with “Reality Check” for Web traffic.

There are plenty of other things you might have expected the Obama tech-savvy team to do on the site. Things like offering supporters boilerplate for a pass-along e-mail that challenges a particular myth could have made the site user’s experience easy and productive.

The cardinal rule: Make the experience as easy and user-friendly as possible.

It seems that any business that wants to stimulate a viral Web campaign can take some lessons from “Reality Check” on how NOT to do it.

Good thing Obama’s recent speech on health care reform boosted the plan’s popularity nearly 15 points in the public opinion polls. If they’d been depending on “Reality Check” to accomplish the same thing, the wait could have been long and disappointing.

Businesses that need to refresh their reputation or dispute a negative image of their products would do well to use the Web to spread their own perspective and message.

But the effort can be costly and wasteful if some basic rules of Web site optimization and management aren’t followed.

Tags: death panels, health care reform, obama, optimization, reality check, Web site