This isn’t the first time the American people have seen this kind of electrified response to a candidate running for President. It happened once before when JFK proved that charisma, charm, passion and desire for change are all best expressed through a then relatively new visual medium “television” — an opportunity Kennedy capitalized on in September 1960 with the first televised Presidential debate running against Richard Nixon, a man who at the time looked like he had been beaten with a stress stick. Nerves aside, Nixon had just come off an injury and hadn’t gained his weight back, and Kennedy had just spent time in California campaigning, bringing a healthy, energetic look to the debate.
The medium allowed the charming, youthful come-from-nowhere wealthy Irish Catholic Senator from Massachusetts to gain control of the most powerful and arguably influential position in the world. American voters were afforded the ability to see and share more of the candidate and take in more information than simply listening to a speech on the radio could provide, and JFK left a powerful impression, leading to his win and the closest election result in history.
Why the Internet has an influence in this election
The 2008 Presidential race isn’t exactly the same situation for Obama as it was with Kennedy but they do share the opportunistic position to exploit the benefits of a relatively new marketing medium. Obama enters the race at a time when the Internet, already fueled by a youthful exuberance of sharing and transparency, is demanding the same from their Presidential candidates.
Obama has long established himself as an upstanding, honest and transparent individual, long touting himself as the center of change, speaking to that little voice in everyone who asks themselves “What would I do differently if I were President?” and promising that those sometimes lofty and simplistic ideas can actually become reality — that for one of us little guys it is possible for one individual to make a difference in the world, and this individual-centric optimism is one of the hallmarks of the internet.
Barack established early on that he has an obvious understanding of the internet and how it is used, and perhaps this goes to his age since he is a few generations closer to the front lines of the internet movement. This desire to share may even be a naturally organic extension of the way he expresses himself and he shares without question, regardless, the appeal of this is apparent when looking at traffic stats for both Barack Obama and John McCain in a variety of web sites and social networks.
I thought it might be interesting to see how each of the candidates has presented themselves online and their different marketing approaches, and how well their campaigns have performed.
[ All data and stats were collected at the time of this writing ]
John McCain Twitter Account [ visit ]
Account at a glance: The bulk of the content is combative and has Barack’s name plastered all over it, so much so that I’m surprised the page doesn’t show up on Obama searches, a campaign style which mirrors his public appearance.
Following: 4,574
Followers: 4,396
Updates: 25 since September 19, 2008
Barack Obama Twitter Account [ visit ]
Account at a glance: A welcoming page of updates. Much of the language going back to the first post way back on April 29, 2007 is positive, engaging, compelling and interesting. The updates barely even mention McCain and all the language seems to say “here is what I am doing, come check it out”. His Twitter campaign is as focused as all of his other public engagements, from talking about “Change we need” and asking followers to watch a rally or visit his site to see how much his new tax calculator can tell you how much money his new tax plan will save you. His policy of promoting himself as a man of the people with the desire to really get things done is abundently apparent in the Twitter account and the stats clearly support this policy.
Following: 114,166
Followers: 110,015
Updates: 251 updates since April 29, 2007
Google Site Links
In using link:barackobama.com on Google.com, the results show that there are approximately 10,900 sites linking to BarackObama.com, whereas link:JohnMcCain.com shows a close race at 9,530.
Google Site Index
Entering site:barackobama.com into Google.com will yield an outstanding 3,900,000 results for barackobama.com web pages indexed by Google. I had to follow it out to 1,000 results just to make sure that this was the case. Following the same process of site:johnmccain.com for McCain’s web site came up with only 33,200 of his web pages and the wild difference between the two compelled me to follow his results out to 1,000 for verification, and the results stand.
Alexa and Compete
Alexa is widely accepted as a benchmark for domain and site traffic valuations. It has it’s drawbacks, but a great place to get a sense of how the domains are used and where they rank among the worlds most visited sites. It simply measures how many visitors a site receives and who also have the Alexa tool bar installed, or as Alexa puts it, “Simply by using the toolbar each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not”.
BarackObama.com has an Alexa ranking of just 779, while JohnMcCain.com has an Alexa ranking of 2,702. These numbers may seem fairly close, but the differences in traffic is enormous. According to Compete.com which utilizes the same strategy as Alexa, they report traffic rankings of 186 and 402 respectively, and built on unique visitor traffic totalling 5,538,460 generating 10,980,922 visits to BarackObama.com, and 3,117,691 unique visitors generating 4,633,108 visits to JohnMcCain.com.
WebsiteGrader.com
One of the other measuring tools I use is WebsiteGrader.com, which runs a script that looks at a website and grades it on a number of useful and meaningful points, and compiles a score out of 100, or as they say about their service, “measures the marketing effectiveness of a website”. Some of the data it uses includes Google and Alexa data already mentioned. Here is how the McCain site scored;
JohnMcCain stats summary
Website Grade: 98.4
Google Page Rank: 8
Google Indexed Pages: 33,600
Traffic Rank: 2,580
Blog Rank: 4,604,503 [ visit ]
Inbound Links: 1,392,314
del.icio.us Bookmarks 453
Link to the online report: Click for report
BarackObama.com stats summary
Website Grade: 96.8
Google Page Rank: 8
Google Indexed Pages: 3,770,000
Traffic Rank: 753
Blog Rank: Not Ranked (site has a blog [ visit ] but not set to autodiscover)
Inbound Links: 6,643,348
del.icio.us Bookmarks: 2,807
Link to the online report: Click for report
The interesting elements to note are the stats which deal with sharing, such as the del-iciou-us bookmarks, with Barack coming in at six times the number of bookmarks. In addition, the report indicates that McCain has 223 articles submitted to Digg with 4,913 votes, while Obama has fewer articles at 160, but more votes for them at 6,966. Barack also has 5 times the number of inbound links suggesting that there is more interest in linking to Obama than McCain.
Other sites
MySpace
Barack Obama [ visit ]: 819,022 friends
John McCain [ visit ]: 212,417 friends
Facebook
Barack Obama [ visit ]: 2,337,191 supporters
John McCain [ visit ]: 613,763 supporters
The “net” result
It is clear that Obama has won the battle for Internet superiority. As more and more people are choosing to consume content online rather than in print, Obama has his fingers in all the right outlets for communicating his bold, exciting message to the public. Combine the right message at the right time through the right medium, and you have yourself a new President. I propose that these numbers are a much more accurate reflection of candidate interest born out of the basic natural organic online human behaviour which is much more valuable and honest than any data collected in a telephone poll.