The article claims that this election is referred to as the "first Internet election" and analyzes some of the ways in which the web has become a platform for campaigning through "organizing, fundraising, networking and analyzing news."
Apparently, throughout most of the campaign, Obama's website and online resources toppled McCain's substantially. Though in recent weeks, the McCain web team has seemed to catch up and now has networking resources online that "rival Obama's." But some other findings of the Pew study were the levels of popularity among the most prominent social networking groups, such as MySpace and Facebook. Obama's MySpace page, which is cleanly laid out and easy to navigate boasts more than 540,000 friends, while McCain's MySpace, a little less traditional in its layout (and personally, more confusing), lists just over 100,000. Obama also has more Facebook supporters by a 5-to-1 margin, and more than four times as many videos posted to his YouTube page, with 1,330 compared to McCain's 279.
An early audit of the presidential candidates' online resources during the primaries revealed that Obama's website was among the most advanced and useful to supporters even back in July 2007, while McCain's "lagged far behind." Even now, Obama has far more tools for supporters interested in grassroots activities, and McCain only recently caught up by adding a personal profile application to his website that Obama had in operation over a year ago.
The very popular MyBO pages (sample on top) on Obama's website have been active for months, and allow for individual profiles, blogs, links, groups and networking with other Obama supporters. They are easy to set up and use and mimic facebook pages. However, until this past month, McCain's options for customization allowed a personal page that resulted in an error message and had very little practicality. In the past month though, the McCain team has completely revamped their website and added McCainSpace, which are personalized pages that are comparable to Obama's with similar features (on bottom).
As for appealing to different demographic groups, Obama's website houses pages for about 20 different groups from veterans to women to kids and environmentalists. McCain's site has only 17 (11 of which were added within the last month), and among those he does not appeal to are LBGTQ, Native Americans, kids under 18, Generation "O" (25-35), seniors, and students. Among those Obama does not include (that McCain does) are racing fans, Catholics, lawyers and Lebanese Americans.
With all of this information and more, the Pew research group determined that Obama is hands-down winning the Internet campaign, even despite McCain's many website enhancements. HitWise reported that of the hits between both websites in the week ending August 30, Obama's received 72% while McCain only had 28%. With all of the additions and efforts made by the McCain team to become a more powerful online force in the past few weeks, it would seem that the Pew research group is correct in its assumption that this election is largely internet based, and maybe the behind-the-times Republican candidate is finally beginning to figure that out. But, is it too late?
1 comment:
Good points, however, in one of the polls C-Mac pointed out, the internet is dominated by young people, and most of these figures reflect the youth, who are much less likely to vote than old people. Hopefully this year is different.
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