Conversational Media: Digital Elections

Now through Election Day, MediaPost is hosting a one-time political media discussion board, Red, White & Blog, focused on how media is shaping the race for the White House, and how that in turn may re-shape media. As the media is playing a role that we have not seen before in any elections, this and other initiatives in the US and overseas (such as US Elections 2008, the LiveJournal community of non-US papers) facilitate open discussion of significant political issues.
How important is the internet as a source of information to voters? And, more importantly, what's the real impact of online media on these elections?

It appears as though the parties are taking two very different approaches to online media. Social networks have clearly established themselves as grass-roots campaign platforms in this election. Your friends become a part of your own very personalized debate experience and they have a major impact on its content. The Obama campaign has been particularly active and creative in how it has leveraged its base through Facebook, enrolling active on-the-ground support to drive voter registration, sell yard signs and T-shirts, solicit donations and so on.

The candidates are certainly playing the political media game online and paying attention to their demographics and media coverage based on some of the trends we are seeing in their strategies.
McCain’s campaign is present in the social media space, but not as popular. Using Facebook as an example, some quick analysis this morning shows that Obama has nearly four times as many Facebook supporters as John McCain. Obama has more than 2 million Facebook supporters, an indication that he is playing into his online demographic, as is McCain by not focusing as heavily on social media and search.
Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use both social media sites (46% versus 32%) as well as candidate websites (38% versus 24%) to find information about the issues while Republicans are more likely to find information online via news sites (81% versus 90%).
(Kaylan Malm, MediaPost)

More people are now more involved in more ways in this election than for years.

Anyone can create and distribute anything with the result that the campaigns themselves – much like advertisers – have lost much of the control they always thought they had as they crafted their messages and placed them carefully in context. What we now determine as our media moments of this campaign are likely to be more varied and individually determined according to the context in which we consume them.
(Mike Bloxham, MediaPost)

Despite the increasing power of the Internet to the campaign is out of discussion, the social media's influence on these issues is still open to debate. In fact, the candidates are still spending most of their money on advertising with traditional media on 30-second commercials.
As Lois Kelly pointed out in an article about Social Media and the 2008 Presidential Campaign, if a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, if a goal has been to engage with young voters, if a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate - and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics, the use of social media has been a hugely successful strategy.

As observed by Kaylan Malm on Red, White and Blog:

By far the biggest take away I see from this election when it comes to media is the fact that candidates are paying attention. They are looking at the numbers, bringing together online strategists and pairing them with their offline media strategists, and they are not risking their fate by ignoring emerging media. It will take many elections before we fully understand the impact of online media specifically.
Issues change, candidates change, new media emerges, and just as the candidates are challenged on how to respond in the space, we are each challenged by how to measure their response.