Some interesting findings…

TechPresident.com recently highlighted a new report from Temple University’s Insititute for Business and Information Technology. Titled Does the Internet Matter? (password is: templeowls), Temple’s Sunil Wattal, David Schuff and Munir Mandviwalla researced how social media may have affected the presidential campaign. Their findings are from monitoring 15 candidates over the 1-year period between Feb. 2007 and Feb. 2008.

The report begins with this assertion: The Internet may dramatically increase the role of citizens, provide superior information leading to better informed citizenry, and in general achieve the utopia of a direct democracy. The researchers add that they believe the Internet could also “foster a new generation of politicians who ignore traditional ‘big money’ tactics in favor of grassroots campaigns.” This was proven as a viable strategy with Obama’s remarkable fundraising success.

Now on to some of the numbers from the report. In the 12-month period studied, Obama (enjoying a 39% share) was first in website visitors and page views (17%) among the eight Democratic candidates. Hillary Clinton was the closest competitor at 30% and 13% shares. The Temple researchers think that their dominance mirrors the amount of coverage they received in the mainstream media. On the Republican side, it was a whole different story and very surprising. Ron Paul (30%) led in the number of visitors and Duncan Hunter (who?) led in page views (18%). The researchers guess that site visits indicate interest in a candidate while page views indicated the depth of interest. The page views were fairly equally spread among both Democrats and Republicans, debunking the assumption that the Internet allows voters to learn more about lesser known candidates. The tool is obviously there, but most people aren’t using it, preferring to learn more about their candidate instead.

Among Democrats, Obama was second in blog mentions and first on both YouTube and MySpace. Among Republicans, Ron Paul was most prominent on YouTube and MySpace. An interesting point the researchers make is that neither Obama nor Paul were frontrunners during the period the study was conducted.

Finally, perhaps the most surprising finding was that blog mentions were significantly correlated to an increase in Gallup polling results. The researchers point out that blog mentions caused better numbers in polling than MySpace, YouTube, Web 1.0 media and traditional media. They conclude that the advantage of blogs is that they “credibly socialize and scale campaign movements like no other web 2.0 technology.” The report is well worth reading and at least checking out its graphs and tables.

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Tags: democrats, Duncan Hunter, Gallup, Hillary Clinton, internet, MySpace, obama, republicans, research, ron paul, TechPresident.com, Temple, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, youtube

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