The idea of the Internet being the great equalizer for grass roots efforts taking on established, powerful entities appeals to people with a broad range of interests. We have seen the non-stop buzz for Paul’s campaign as the latest evidence of this.

According to analytics firm Compete, Paul supporters have demonstrated how effective online tools can be in assisting in organizing events and fundraising.

Compete’s Matt Pace said the campaign’s use of Meetup.com offered a "case study" on turning online activism into offline action. Paul’s 82,000+ Meetup members held nearly 21,000 events to build support and raise funds for him.

Compete measures a metric they call Candidate FaceTime to determine how much time a candidate receives in front of people online. It looks at the total hours voters spend with a candidate on the Internet each month.

As might be expected, Paul tops the list, as people spent over 252,000 hours with him in November 2007. Another Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, surged to second place after a viral video featuring him and Chuck Norris grabbed over 1.2 million views since its debut.

"Huckabee is the only candidate, other than Paul, whose supporters are making heavy use of Meetup.com to rally support," said Pace.

CNN’s Election 2008 poll shows Huckabee’s offline momentum matching his online fame. He ranked behind only Rudy Giuliani in CNN’s latest poll. Paul rated sixth among Republican nominees.

In addition to the latest polls, the dashboard also tracks current search buzz for each candidate as Yahoo users look for more information. It also keeps track of how much money each candidate has raised.

But what’s also neat about it, aside from the slick look of the thing and the demographic breakdowns, is that users can break down results by state. For example, if you know that Kentucky has a long tradition of voting for the candidate that eventually wins, you might pay extra attention to who’s leading in that state, at least according to search buzz.

Currently, it’s Barack Obama piquing Kentucky searcher interest, as well as Ron Paul, by an overwhelming majority (74%) on the Republican side.

On a national scale, though, when you include polls, searches, the prediction market, and money raised, it’s a much different picture, with the old standby political powerhouses like Clinton and Giuliani in the lead overall. 
 

Presidential Candidate Thompson Draws Traffic

Fred08.com received 34 percent of U.S. visits among the entire presidential candidate Web sites for that week. Visitors to Fred Thompson’s site were primarily male (65 %) and older (40% being 55 or older). Of all traffic to his site, 10 percent of it came from Tennessee online users where he was Senator.

Other presidential candidates who sites did well were Democratic candidate Barack Obama who’s site received 13 percent of U.S. visits for last week, the second most visits for all candidates. Close behind Obama’s Web site was Republican candidate Ron Paul’s Web site which received 12 percent of visits.

The traffic from social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, increased 205 percent to all the candidate Web sites in August 2007 compared to January 2007. Ron Paul received the most traffic from social networks, followed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"The online focus of the last presidential election was all about blogs and their effectiveness in communicating with potential voters," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.

"In the 2008 Presidential election, the Internet’s role is changing from a one way communication channel to a two-way conversation enabled by social networking."

CNN was the first to announce it, a while back, after pressured by an left-right alliance led by Stanford professor and lawyer Lawrence Lessig. Initially opposed to allowing debate footage to be shared, both ABC and NBC recently followed suit, with ABC making its announcement in advance of Sunday night’s Republican debate, and NBC announcing the same policy change for last night’s AFL-CIO Democratic debate.

NBC put more restrictions on the footage – videos must be attributed to MSNBC, be used without commercial intent, and moderators are not to be used in ads – but nobody’s complaining.

“ABC and NBC deserve praise for leveling the playing field–allowing everyday people to share key debate moments on blogs and YouTube just like the networks choose moments to show on the air,” said Adam Green, who leads media reform and Internet freedom campaigns for MoveOn.org Civic Action. “It’s good for our democracy that TV networks are removing themselves as the sole deciders of which debate moments can have a life online.”

With all of the television networks loosening their grip on political footage, the 2008 Presidential race, crowded and fragmented as it is, should shape up to be most publicly involved election in American history.

“These networks are not only embracing new technology, but new communities," Mike Krempasky, co-founder of RedState.com, said. "Their willingness to loosen the reins a bit will go a long way towards improving our politics as more and more people get involved.”

It’s also somewhat bittersweet for an audience, growing more cynical with every Daily Show episode, that has become nearly as distrustful of the media as they have of politicians.

“It is really great to see the networks beginning to take their community service role seriously again," said Carl Malamud, the founder of Public.Resource.Org. whose pressure led to C-SPAN’s change of heart. "They should be congratulated for encouraging this public use of election footage."

That leaves CBS as the lone hold-out in regards to how it will handle the call for loosening of restrictions, and Fox made it clear in USA Today that it would treat debate footage just as does all of its programming.

But Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is hopeful that CBS will change its mind, leaving Fox out on a stingy limb. "Democracy works best when citizens are active participants in the debates," he said. "I encourage all media organizations to think about what kinds of content they could make available for re-use to allow people to get involved."

"An effective online campaign strategy encompasses much more than just putting up a nice Web site," said Jeffrey Herzog, CEO, iCrossing. "Our research shows that people are looking for election-related information online, but most presidential hopefuls are missing out on the opportunity."

Forty-seven percent of those who go online for political information use search engines to do their research. Eighty-eight percent of those who use the Internet for political information visit online news sites and 42 percent go to social media sites. Just 30 percent go to a candidate’s Web site.

Out of potential voters who are looking for election information online, 61 percent of 18 to 24 year olds and 55 percent of 25 to 34 year olds search for information on user-driven content sites such as blogs, YouTube and Wikipedia.

The iCrossing study says that candidates need to build out content around highly-searched issue based terms and focus their online marketing campaigns on building visibility for them in both paid and organic search.

Yahoo Runs For The White House

Politicians who dream of winning the Presidential race in 2008 and inheriting challenges like the war in Iraq, nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, and a host of domestic issues, will be the front and center focus on the Yahoo News-hosted election website.

Yahoo head of News & Information, Scott Moore, described at Yahoo’s official blog how they were getting ready to become a central point for election news, and how Yahoo users could use their services to engage others:

In addition to the latest news videos, headlines, and political commentary, you’ll find dedicated pages for each candidate. If you catch a campaign event, upload your photos or video to Flickr, Yahoo! Video or You Witness News – or all three.

Feeling like a pundit? Look for a Yahoo! Answers question to weigh in on. Want to find birds of a feather? Join a Yahoo! Group related to your party or candidate. This early version of the site is just a start — tools like MyBlogLog and Upcoming.org will be incorporated soon.

Yahoo has already enjoyed some political participation at its vastly successful Answers site. Both John McCain and Hilary Clinton have had questions posted there. Clinton’s proved a bigger draw than Oprah Winfrey’s, which had been the leader in drawing responses at Yahoo Answers.

The Presidential Election site carries pertinent news stories about the candidates, and profile pages for each who is active in the race. Audio and video content also appear there, and links to other Yahoo services encourage the participation that will keep users on their properties.