It’s been clear for some time that the McCain campaign is way behind the Obama campaign in all kinds of social media metrics. Obama has more that twice as many unique visitors to his website (not a good sign if you assume that a good deal of this traffic is coming from last-minute deciders), four times as many views of his YouTube videos, four times as many friends on MySpace, four times as many friends on Facebook, etc.
But maybe all that webby stuff doesn’t matter as much as the ability to turn out the troops on the ground. But in that respect, I’ve also been struck by what seems to be a big imbalance in the two campaigns’ get-out-the-vote efforts. Take phone-banking. If you search blogs for “Obama phone bank” on Google you’ll get about 1,400 results. For “McCain phone bank” you get 68 hits. A more general Google search on those two phrases yield about 1,800 hits for McCain and 18,000 for Obama.
I’ve seen mention that the GOP claims something like three million voter contacts and phone calls were made this past Saturday, which would be an impressive number. I have to say, if something that big is going on, the web would reflect it. Even if McCain’s base is older and less webby than Obama’s base, there would be many more references online to McCain phone banks.
P.S. And all of this is assuming that the voter lists being used actually target undecided and persuadable voters. One writer at Salon suggests this may not be the case.
November 03, 2008