Commentary

Politics has seen the future and it is New Media

The biggest news about Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign seems to be the mountain of dough that it raked in – reportedly $600 million. That’s impressive, but I think the explosion of new media content for laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and ipods had a lot to do with Obama’s 2008 election win, too.

Podcasting News argues that Obama’s attention to new media, such as YouTube videos, podcasts and the development of social networks, were significant factors that helped ensure his victory over his more Flintstonian rival, John McCain.

Here is a comparison of new media efforts put forth by the Obama and McCain campaigns from Podcasting News:

On YouTube:

• “When it comes to YouTube, there was no contest: Obama blew away McCain.”
• “Obama’s official YouTube channel has received 4 times as many views as McCain’s, 97 million vs 24 million.“
• “.. Obama didn’t just get more views. He’s made much better use of YouTube, populating it with nearly 2,000 videos and attracting over 117,000 subscribers. That’s about 5 times as many videos as McCain, and about 4 times as many subscribers.”

On podcasting:

• “Obama established an official video podcast early on, and has published dozens of podcast episodes. And while Obama was making great use of podcasts, John McCain was missing in action.”

On Mobile content:

• “Early on in Obama’s campaign, he started using new media tools to get his message onto mobile devices. For example, within iTunes, you could download two audiobooks by Obama, two Obama albums, the Official Barack Obama Podcast and even an iPhone application.”

On Social Networking:

• “…A look at Obama’s homepage shows that he staked out a presence on Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Digg and Twitter too.”

Podcasting News also noted that Obama benefited from viral web content. Although there were some negative videos of McCain and his sidekick, Sarah Palin, bouncing around the web, the most popular viral videos were positive, such as “I Got a Crush…On Obama”, by BarelyPolitical aka Obama Girl, and Will.I.Am’s “Yes We Can” video. This demonstrated the value of a strong new media presence. Obama’s engagement with younger tech-savvy voters to create genuine and popular campaign content that was also free. Supporters then shared this viral content on social networking sites.

ReadWriteWeb came up with some useful stats regarding blogs and social media sites and the political process. Over the past year, 500 million blog posts mentioned Obama, compared to 150 million that referred to McCain. They also said that Obama had four times as many MySpace friends, and over twenty times as many followers on Twitter. Granted, the numbers for each are small relative to the number of registered voters, but they are significant younger viewers rapidly adapt to these communication channels.

In future election battles many more politicians will embrace new media resources. All candidates have access to the kinds of resources that helped Obama generate enthusiasm among young voters. Although he spent a fortune on old media TV ads and infomercials, his campaign created a blueprint for how future campaigns that they will assuredly follow. New media is cost effective, younger voters are comfortable with it, and will continue to use it as they age and gain influence.

Given the still relatively small numbers of new media users/voters compared to conventional couch potatoes/voters, Obama’s old media blitz had more to do with his victory. But, the influence of YouTube, podcasting and social networking is growing as television and print media slide in reach and content previously found in one medium becomes available anywhere.

Let me know what you think of new media’s influence on the 2008 election. Is this all hype, or could new media seriously alter how campaigns are both run and financed in the near future?

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© 2008 Splendid Marbles.