WEBMONDAY EVENT TO
WEBCAMPAIGNING IN THE US:
Monday, October 27th 2008,
7.00PM (19.00Uhr)
on our Adobe-Connect-Platform
The online acitivies of the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain are catching attention from all over the world as they show the present state of the art in webcampaigning at a level not foreseen. At the same time the internet serves as a platform for information-exchange, discussion and debate through blogs, media-websites and social-networks.
The book MAKING A DIFFERENCE, edited by Stephen Ward, Diana Owen, Richard Davis and David Taras, tries to give a more global view of what´s going on in webcampaigning. It contains papers about Online Campaigning in Chile, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany which try to give the reader information and systematic understanding of the role of the internet in election politics.
In their contribution Diana Owen and Richard Davis describe the evolution of web-campaigning in the US and focus on the campaings of 2004. At the beginning you find an interesting quote of Dulio and O´Brien who cautioned in 2004, that "any campaign that relies too heavily on the Internet ... had better start drafting a concession speech for election day." This seemed to be true forecasting concerning Howard Dean, who lost the Democratic nomination that year after a brilliant webcampaign, and also concerning John Kerry, who relied more on webcampaigning than did George Bush.
Owen and Davis conducted a content analysis of the candidate Websites and found reinforcment acitivities on one hand - such as email alerts and weblogs - and on the other hand recruitment/mobilization acitivities - such as asking for donations, inviting people to volunteer for a capaign, to help organize campaign events, to participate in online discussions, to contribute to a candidate's weblog, to forward links to candidate websites and to engage in similar acitivities.
There is a lot of information packed in interesting charts in that paper. The main impact of the mobilization efforts of the campaigns on frequent users of candidate's websites for example was to make them forward links to the campaign's website. Half of the participants of the survey of Owen/Davis subscribed to email alerts (newsletters), a bit more than a quarter read the candidates blog. People who used mobilization sections of candidate websites most likely supported the campaign also with offline activities. Most interesting is the result of that survey in respect to email alerts: 35% of the respondents of the survey believe that emails helped them stay informed about the campaign. Still 49% felt there were too many email alerts and 31% were annoyed by them.
Reflecting the quote of Dulio/O'Brien mentioned above John McCain will be the next President of the United States as Barack Obama evidently has put much more emphasis on his online campaign - and achieved incredible response. We will see in near future!
