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McCain vs. Obama: Showdown on the Web

Rivals use the Net in new ways, but with strategic differences

By Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 29, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have deployed the Internet in unprecedented ways to get their messages across, raise funds, organize supporters and tailor ads to undecided voters.

But they have done so in different ways, and it remains to be seen to what extent the strategies will bear on the outcome of the election.

"In campaigns past, the Internet was a sideshow. There were a lot of interesting things happening, new applications occurring," said Lee Rainie, project director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "But this is really a different kind of year because the Internet is so central to the campaign experience."

By May - long before the national conventions - a record-breaking 46 percent of Americans already had used the Internet, e-mail or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Julie Barko Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, noted the two candidates approached the Internet differently from the beginning.

The Obama campaign invested a lot of time and staff to build a database to collect information about its supporters, Germany said.

The campaign also was more experimental, making connections with the popular social networking sites My Space, Facebook and Twitter, and even lesser-known and more specialized ones such as MiGente.com, BlackPlanet.com and AsianAve.com.

"The fact of the matter is that from a user perspective, Obama supporters were much more into the newer elements of the Web than McCain supporters," Rainie said.

Obama's "myBO" social-networking application has garnered more than 1 million user accounts and promoted more than 75,000 campaign "events," according to Blue State Digital, the outside group that has helped spearhead Obama's online campaign.

The McCain campaign, meanwhile, recognized that its core supporters aren't necessarily the types to spend time on social-networking sites, Rainie and Germany said.

McCain instead used the Internet as a way to reach the media, through a series of videos posted on his Web site and YouTube and "designed to get air play and get people talking," Germany said.

Statistics support those strategic differences.

Obama consistently has displayed more online ads across the Internet, including social-networking sites. The Obama ads generated 281.9 million views in July alone compared with 2.6 million views for McCain ads, according to the research firm comScore.

Andrew Lipsman, a comScore senior analyst, said Obama's ads have tried to build his "brand" of change, and have been an effective way to reach a large audience. He noted the ads typically ask Americans to join the campaign by pushing a button.

By contrast, McCain has enjoyed a handsome edge in terms of videos viewed on his Web site - 1.7 million in July compared with 316,000 for videos on Obama's Web site. Last Monday, the site featured three 30-second spots that attacked Obama's positions on taxation and the economy.

McCain, who trails Obama in fundraising on the Internet, has been successful generating free media coverage from the video ads, Lipsman and Germany said.

The Internet strategies have changed some since the recent national conventions.

McCain has bolstered his Web site with new features and content, according to a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence.

The new features include tools to encourage networking among supporters and grass-roots campaigning. McCain also emphasized Sarah Palin, his vice presidential pick, more than Obama emphasized his vice presidential choice, Joe Biden, immediately after the national conventions.

Still, the Pew study, published in mid-September, concluded that Obama's Web site still was easier for supporters and volunteers to read the latest news, receive talking points, make computer-assisted phone calls to undecided voters and map out door-to-door campaigns in their neighborhoods.

But last week, McCain appeared to be trying to counter that, showing that his Web site likely will be fluid from now until the election. His campaign on Tuesday replaced the attack videos on the home page of his Web site with an expanded online phone bank tool.

By Wednesday afternoon, when McCain announced he would suspend campaigning to focus on the nation's financial crisis, the phone bank feature had been displaced by a feature on corporate reform and McCain's plan for "Jobs for America."

Through it all, both campaigns have been collecting data about the people who visit their Web sites, through Internet cookies and by working with search engines such as AOL, Microsoft and Google that can track Web-browsing activities.

Now, with the final leg of the campaign here, both candidates will use the data they have collected to create messages that appear to be as individually targeted as possible, Germany said.

The campaigns will try to deliver those messages in the most persuasive manner as possible, depending on the individual: e-mail or text message, phone call, a neighbor knocking on somebody's door, a video, a posting on a social networking site, a display ad on the Internet.

For example, a banner ad of Obama's VoteforChange.com, a tool to help Americans register and find their polling stations, came up when this reporter typed in the search terms "polling stations and Denver" on Google last week.

R. Rebecca Donatelli, chairwoman of Campaign Solutions, the agency helping to run McCain's online campaign, said such micro-targeting on the Internet is changing the complexion of election campaigns.

"When all is said and done and we examine how and why people came to their conclusions, I think we'll be astounded how influenced they were by what they saw and read on the Internet," Donatelli said.

Tom Gensemer, managing partner at Blue State Digital, the Internet shop that works with Obama, emphasized that online behavioral targeting is still in the testing-the-water stage.

While delivering a targeted online ad may turn out to be significant, Gensemer said he believed what may prove to be more important is enhanced voter data and Obama's "neighbor-to-neighbor tool" for identifying and persuading undecided voters through door knocking by a volunteer or a timely phone call.

A voter's public file increasingly is becoming a tool of valuable information such as party registration, phone numbers and even voter history such as whether one is likely to vote early. Both campaigns will use that data to help identify voters to target.

It won't be known until election results which campaign was more effective in building its databases and using the Internet to turn out the vote and the grass-roots support, experts said. Or whether the Internet itself made that much difference at all.

"Will it increase turnout among young people?" Rainie asked. "It's hard to know. Clearly the younger voters are much more enthusiastic about this election than in the past and clearly more enthusiastic about technology than older people."

That should favor Obama unless - as in past elections - young voters fail to sway the outcome.

smithje@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5155

About their Web sites

Barack Obama's Web site, barackobama.com, makes it easier for supporters to volunteer and take action, according to a recent study by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence. But John McCain has substantially improved his johnmccain.com Web site since the National Republican Convention.

Obama's Web site:

* Generates triple the traffic of McCain's Web site.

* Supporters can receive the latest campaign news, get sample scripts/talking points, download campaign fliers, make phone calls to undecided voters in swing states and map out door-to-door campaigning in their neighborhood.

* Obama continues to enjoy a substantial lead over McCain in terms of social networking. He has more MySpace supporters by a nearly 6-to-1 ratio, and more Facebook friends by more than a 5-to-1 ratio.

* Obama's site links to mainstream media news stories more frequently than McCain's.

McCain's Web site:

* McCain's videos generate triple the traffic of Obama's Web site.

* Since the Republican National Convention, tools have been improved to encourage supporters to network, organize events, volunteer and recruit friends. Last week, McCain provided an expanded phone bank tool. A day later, the site had reforms for the financial crisis.

* "Change" has been the slogan of Obama's campaign. But recently, McCain's site featured "change" more frequently and prominently.

* The McCain campaign more prominently featured his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, on the site after the national conventions than Obama had for VP choice Joe Biden.

Comments

  • September 29, 2008

    8:33 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    MrCrush writes:

    If you vote for Obama:

    Your taxes will go up across the board.
    You will be inviting terrorism to our soil again.
    The economy will get much worse.
    The borders will open even wider.
    You're accepting Anti-American behavior in your president.
    You're electing the most liberal person in Congress.

    PERIOD!

    McCain/Palin 2008

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