It wasn’t all that long ago that candidates started to migrate a hefty portion of their outreach to voters campaigns on-line. At first, the necessity was simply having a website, the Internet home of the campaign, but little else in terms of multimedia or content.
That has quickly changed. In the new world of state and national campaigns, candidates are pioneering new ways to get their message through an increasingly hostile traditional print and broadcast media.
Now, just having a website seems dull. Many campaigns have outreach efforts online at MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, MeetUp, and a broad swath of other “New Media” sites. Fundraising over the web seems to be growing; it’s a quick and easy way to process credit cards. But another key is delivering a campaign’s message online–and there’s no better way to do that then speaking DIRECTLY to the voters.
An early case in point for on-line campaigns was the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign. The campaign made excellent use of the talents of videographers like Justin Germany. Site features also included organizing local “Party’s for the President” and emailing letters to the editor, calling talk radio, etc.
Speed back to the present in 2007, and you will find a burgeoning online presence by most serious 2008 presidential contenders.
In a recent blog post at the Town Hall blog, Matt Lewis comments on the McCain campaign’s use of New Media to circumvent “hostile conservative media.” But the real show is being broadcast on an entirely different channel–McCain isn’t just getting around “conservative media”, he’s broadcasting his message around the increasingly hostile traditional and mainstream media. And he’s drawing people to his website for more than just a quick fix on the latest news. Visitors can participate in an NCAA bracket challenge, create their own McCainSpace, and even submit their own questions to the Senator via YouTube for a future “virtual townhall.”
LJ at Race42008.com captures a glimmer of McCain’s New Media machine in a post titled, “The McCain Show.” (NOTE: I will chronicle more of McCain’s New Media in the coming weeks, stay tuned.)
On the other side of the coin, New Media can torpedo a campaign, if used covertly. If you haven’t already seen this anti-Hillary video that appeared anonymously on YouTube, I’ll leave it up to you to decide what kind of an impact it will have. At present, it has received more than a million hits:
UPDATE: The cat is out of the bag on who made the video–but what does it all mean? Stay tuned to see if this story makes it through the next 24 hour news cycle. Patrick Hynes weighs in here.
