US Election 2008: Following the Virtual Campaign

by Rob Walker | October 30, 2008 at 11:10 am

239 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

I've been writing about the United States elections for most of the last year, all through the exciting Democratic race between Obama and Clinton (and the less exciting Republican race).

Since all of our work is done online, we've been focusing on the virtual side of the campaign. While of course John McCain and Barack Obama have websites, we wanted to find out what other ways the candidates are engaging people online.

Official sites

Barack Obama's official site

John McCain's official site

Social Networking

John McCain has a myspace page, as well as a twitter feed. The twitter feed isn't super active, but he does update it when something big is happening.

McCain has a fairly large facebook following, and of course his own page.

Obama has a myspace page as well and a very active twitter feed, he updated about 3 hours ago as opposed to McCain's 5 days ago.

Obama has a huge following on facebook, with over two million friends on his list:

According to research by the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), released in mid-September, Obama's campaign website has consistently attracted about three-quarters of the total traffic to his and McCain's sites (McCain's site gets 28 per cent of it). Obama's site also has five times more registered users than McCain's. It doesn't end there. Obama has become the darling of social networking, a master of so called "Facebook politics". He has hired Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, to help with his campaign, and as of press time had 2,011,014 Facebook friends, while McCain had 558,737. On MySpace, Obama had 668,429 supporters, McCain 156,088. And on his official YouTube channel, Obama had 95,586 subscribers to McCain's 23,427.

Going Viral

Both campaign had big hits online with various viral videos, the two biggest being nothing the candidates could have prepared for.

One of the most watched Obama videos is 'Barack Roll', which takes the Rick Roll sensation to a whole new level. On an official level, Barack's 'Yes we Can' music video is just pure awesomeness.

McCain suffered a whole new level of mockery when he didn't show up on Letterman's show, his being caught just down the street preparing for a different interview was a huge online hit. His official video is the much less popular 'courageous service' video.

Online Campaigning

The US campaign isn't just alive and well in real life, or print and media - it's transferred over to videogames as well. From advertising in videogames (Barack Obama bought adspace in an xbox 360 game) to full marches and rallies in the virtual world of Second Life:

It's not just Earthbound voters who are intensely following the U.S. presidential campaign: The race also is a hot topic in the virtual world of Second Life.

John McCain supporters and Barack Obama supporters – more accurately, the personas they have created – meet regularly in Second Life, described on its website as “an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its residents.”

They watch the presidential debates together. They make T-shirts, banners and yard signs. They hold voter registration drives and rally on Capitol Hill.

ComScore has just released some interesting statistics on online campaigns performance of Barack Obama and John McCain. The report addresses the first six month of 2008 and takes into account visits to their respective websites, videos viewed, searches for both Barack Obama and John McCain on 5 major US search engines and display advertising efforts of both candidates across the entire web.

Obama Online

Even before he began his run for the democratic candidacy, Barack Obama was asking people to use his website to organize and plan events, as well as meet other like-minded people locally:

The websites are part of a strategy that Obama announced in an online video, in February 2007, even before he formally launched his presidential campaign. He asked his online audience to "use this website as a tool to organize your friends, your neighbors and your networks."

258,000. That's the number of people his campaign says have already donated to him, and it amounts to more than a doubling of his fund-raising base in the past three months. "He's got a much more viral campaign than we do," says an envious Hillary Clinton strategist, using a term for word-of-mouth advertising and marketing techniques. "He's got a real buzz about him."

Barack Obama's campaign spent nearly $3 million on online advertising related purchases between January and April. The biggest recipient of the Democratic Presidential hopeful's online ad dollars was Google.

McCain Online

John McCain was a little slower on the draw than Obama in getting his online presence up and running, but even in May of this year he was courting left wing bloggers and online writers:

In the annals of online campaigning, senator John McCain has rarely blazed new paths. But a recent initiative to hold conference call briefings with left-wing and issue-based bloggers could be a presidential campaign first.

Web commentators, including Republican online strategist Patrick Ruffini, have taken aim at McCain's e-mail strategy and questioned the campaign's drop-off in display advertising. "[T]heir once ubiquitous Google display ads disappeared from sites like mine," wrote Ruffini on the TechPresident blog earlier this month. "It’s clear than [sic] when push came to shove, the higher-ups did not view a sophisticated Web operation as the profit center it is on almost all campaigns that try it."

There is still some controversy over online advertising showing John McCain 'winning' the debate- hours before it even started:

Nice catch by Chris Cillizza over at the WaPo campaign blog. He has a screenshot of an online ad that slipped out early declaring McCain tonight's debate winner. This is a strategy ripped right out of the Kerry 04 playbook, and it worked.

Tech Savvy

While neither Obama nor McCain are hackers in their own right, Obama definitely has a leg up when it comes to technology. Aside from getting on the social networking bandwagon earlier, the vast majority of his fundraising comes from online social efforts.

McCain has already stated he is pretty much a 'technology luddite' and doesn't use computers to check his email (or use google, for that matter). But is that enough for either candidate?

That's right. What it sounds like is a guy who memorized this statement, then screwed it up when he finally had to deliver it. And that's pretty dispiriting, because it means that neither candidate -- no matter how sophisticated his online campaign apparatus, no matter how many tech advisers he has on his staff, and no matter how often he references eBay or Google – really has a clue about America's largest manufacturing sector, its greatest source of new job creation, or the dynamo of our economic growth.

The Obama campaign launched a new ad yesterday, “Still,” which mocks John McCain for being out of touch because, among other things, he “doesn’t know how to use a computer” and “can’t send an email.”

It proceeds to ridicule the Republican for his self-confessed inability to send e-mails and vague grasp of computers. And of course there is a picture of President Bush, looking a little goofy, standing next to McCain.