The Web 2.0 Campaign for the White House
The presidential candidates may disagree about Iraq, health care and taxes, but their campaigns demonstrate a clear consensus that the rise of Web 2.0 tools offers the chance to engage interested citizens, one market niche, one voter, one message at a time.
But Edwards is not the only one who is spreading himself all over the Web. Webber believes most of the candidates are guilty of not addressing the issues people care about in a substantive way online. “Everybody in politics is so worried about that last vote that....we lose a lot of the coherence and understanding of who the candidate is, what they actually stand for and what their actual message is because they go across so many different mediums and channels.”
Candidates' Market Share on the Web
The following Hitwise.com data ranks U.S. market share of website visitors for major presidential candidates from a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. The data is for the week ending Nov. 17, 2007.
| Democrats | ||
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Market Share | |
| Barak Obama | 28.47% | |
| Hillary Clinton | 25.72% | |
| John Edwards | 18.31% | |
| Dennis Kucinich | 9.36% | |
| Bill Richardson | 6.36% | |
| Joe Biden | 6.24% | |
| Chris Dodd | 3.14% | |
| Mike Gravel | 2.41% |
| Republicans | ||
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Market Share | |
| Ron Paul | 42.85% | |
| Mike Huckabee | 25.91% | |
| Fred Thompson | 6.89% | |
| Mitt Romney | 6.82% | |
| Rudy Giuliani | 5.61% | |
| John McCain | 5.44% | |
| Tom Tancredo | 3.91% | |
| Duncan Hunter | 2.57% |
User Generated Enthusiasm
When you consider Ron Paul’s haul of donor dollars, there’s no denying Web 2.0 offers new and addictive ways for political junkies to get information about the candidates they might not otherwise hear on the nightly news anywhere, anytime and in so many places. So many blogs. So many YouTube videos. So many social networking links. Meetup.com still offers notices on gatherings for the like-minded, and Eventful.com seeks to generate demand online for candidates to show up in locations around the country.
Gillin says Web 2.0 applications are making it easy for the candidates to spread their message virally because “you’re leveraging your enthusiasts to do your campaigning for you.”
Flash back to 2004, when the Web was merely a tool for communication between the campaigns and their supporters “and the only feedback mechanism was to [respond to] small contributors who could give money and ideas,’’ says Robert Shrum, a retired political consultant who advised several Democratic presidential nominees, including John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Shrum, who is now a senior fellow at New York University, says the current group of candidates is building on what happened four years ago.
In 2004, Democrat Howard Dean and other presidential hopefuls launched fund-raisers online, and Meetup.com provided a bulletin board for like-minded citizens to gather and discuss their favorite candidates.
This year’s tools represent “phase two of that work—you make it far more possible for them to communicate with each other and the rest of universe,” Shrum says.
