An interesting online communications coup from France was the blog opened by François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France 1981-1995, a hero of the Left who's been dead for ten years.

You read that right.

Obviously it was not the real Mitterrand but a pseudonymous commentator, and a pretty good one at that. The articles were written in an elaborate and ironic style somewhat reminiscent of the highly educated, Machiavellian politician. More importantly, they showed a strong inside knowledge of French politics.

Unsurprisingly, the effort generated a lot of buzz, first online and then in the MSM. Questions as to the identity of the author, obviously someone well aware of the Left's byzantine inner struggles, raged.

As for myself, I actually heard about it not through blogs but through Facebook. The author of the blog created a pretty good profile for François Mitterrand, complete with "It's Complicated" as his Relationship Status, a hilarious reference to the late President's famous philandering habits and secret family.

I think this actually marks the first political initiative in France that leveraged socnets, and not just blogs/video, to generate feedback.

As for the author's identity, the blogosphere's ruthless power exposed it pretty quickly. After idle speculation by some journalists, a blogger at Nuesblog exposed the author as Bruno-Roger Petit, a former journalist and now communications director for Arnaud Montebourg, a young hot rising star of the Left. This was done by first comparing some hints from the blog's content with movements by Mr Petit, such as tales of attending certain meetings, etc. — true detective work.

Then the blogger posted the following comment on the Mitterrand blog: "What a good writer that Bruno-Roger P" ("ce qu'il écrit bien ce Bruno Roger P"). The comment was quickly deleted and the comments section locked, a perfect giveaway.

It later emerged from people close to Mr Petit that the blog was an idea by Mr Montebourg and jointly written by the two, even though they both still vigorously deny involvment with the blog (for some reason). A few days later, "François Mitterrand" announced he was shutting down his blog.

I can see three lessons from that story.

Lesson #1: Leveraging socnets works. I heard about this blog from Facebook before I heard about it from the blogosphere, YouTube or the MSM. I suspect this is going to be more and more the case as time passes. Mark Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook "the social operating system of the web," and I think he can do it. For me, Gmail is now an online data storage vault, when I want to reach someone I use Facebook. For politicians, that means socnets should be their #1 platform.

Lesson #2: Don't be afraid of crazy ideas. The dead president blog is a far out idea, but it turned out to be great. Who wouldn't love to read a blog by Reagan commenting on the weak GOP field, dropping delicious bits of insider info here and there? And how much leverage would it generate if it later "emerged" (on purpose or not) that the blog was written by say, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich?

Lesson #3: Buzz is there to be exploited. The outing of Messrs Petit and Montebourg as the authors of the blog should not have prompted them to shut it down — on the contrary! They had built great buzz, and they should have used their outing to increase the blog's popularity. Obviously, it is embarrassing for them since they used the pseudonymous platform to publish some off the record stuff, but hey — c'est la vie. This stuff is online, now you can't take it back. You might as well make the best of it.

This also shows what I say all the time: no matter how eager politicians are to tap into tech, they just don't get it. Messrs Petit and Montebourg should not have acted so rashly when they were outed by the blogosphere — hell, they should have been expecting it, and preparing for it all along. We all know it was bound to happen. When your buzz machine is generating the most buzz, that's not the best time to shut it down. It's time to expand it. Videos? MySpace? The potential was incredible.

Even though it was poorly executed, I still think the Mitterrand blog idea is great, and I hope politicians, in Europe and in America, put out more wacky, interesting initiatives like that.