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Facebook friends vs. YouTube smear jobs: who will win?
by dunkelberg | July 7, 2008 at 01:16 pm | 191 views | 6 comments
Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is sitting pretty on the internet, and apparently not by accident.
If the presidential election could be won with Facebook friends, Obama would win by a landslide. Currently, Barack Obama has more than 1.1 million friends while John McCain weighs in with a paltry 162,000 pals.
But Obama’s Facebook victory can’t be merely attributed to social networkers political leanings. It helps that he hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, 24, in early 2007 to help run his new-media campaign — probably permanently changing the way political races will be run in the future. My.BarackObama.com (MyBo) is the centerpiece of Hughes’ (and Obama’s) online push.
In Texas, Obama lost the popular vote. However, his online organizing managed to sweep away the precinct conventions, leaving him with the most delegates in that hybrid system. It also made it interesting considering his supporters were calling for super delegates to side with the winner of the popular vote in every state, except Texas.
Republican candidate John McCain's camp has offered its own counterattack.
McCain’s social networking strategy has been widely mocked, perhaps unfairly. McCainSpace, part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned,” Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, told the Times.
However, Mr. McCain may be slow on the uptake of any benefits offered by the internet. Thousands of his supporters are not. What's more, it no longer takes any real money or talent to get an attack ad on the internet. Of the more than 200,000 hits you get when searching "obama" on YouTube, a good many of them are attack ads, some predictably racist and vulgar.
The beauty here is Mr. McCain can claim cluelessness and deny it all. He has said he does not want Swiftboating types of attacks, but how can he keep his eager supporters reined in? In truth, he cannot.
There also are other avenues here. Not everyone posting an anti-Obama video is a McCain supporter. No everyone posting an anti-McCain video is an Obama supporter. There are no real borders, boundaries or allegiances required on the internet. A modest amount of decorum is requested by not always given.
Even if a candidate benefitting from an independently produced attack produced for and broadcast on television decries the ad, the internet viral copy never dies. The producer could claim copyright violations, but that is a dead end trail that likely would not end until after the election was over.
It will be interesting to see if Mr. Obama's disciplined internet campaign can stand the seige of anarchy that so often prevails in cyberspace. In the meantime, Mr. McCain continues to chase online supporters and money with little success.
Read the original Adotas.com story quoted.
Read the New York Times story quoted.
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July 7, 2008 at 01:16 pm by dunkelberg, 191 views, 6 comments
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Comments (6)
at 13:31 on July 7th, 2008
Interesting analysis.
at 13:41 on July 7th, 2008
Thanks for the flag and comment.
Cheers!
at 14:19 on July 7th, 2008
dunkelberg,
Very interesting take on the upcoming election. Amazing how big a part the Net apparently played in last year's presidential elections here in France, and it's fascinating to see the impact it's likely to have in the US in the run -up to November's vote.
Thanks for posting this.
at 14:22 on July 7th, 2008
Yes, and thanks for the flag, I think even those who know how to employ it well are racing to keep pace with all the internet offers. That means they also are racing to cut off the opposition at the pass before they can figure it out.
at 14:31 on July 7th, 2008
If they want to succeed in the presidential election, going on the internet is a must. I don't know anyone whos not on the internet (except my grandparents).
at 23:08 on July 7th, 2008
And he's not just on Facebook. He (or rather a surrogate) tweets regularly. They even use it to drive donations. Very clever. This guy is smart, knows how to build and run an organization -- all good qualities for a president.