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"Continuing in the vein of thought we've been running with on the last few campaign pieces we've published, Compete.com today published a study showing the levels of engagement each candidate in the race was achieving with the various presences each candidate has not only at their own campaign websites, but the individual social media presences scattered across the web as well.\nWho was the big winner?  I'll give you a hint: his initials start with Ron Paul.\nAs it turns out, Ron Qaeda's efforts to annoy America into paying attention to their candidate worked like a charm. Chances are, if you've been to anything online pertaining to a Republican presidential candidate, it was Ron Paul, according to the data. 56% of all Republican candidate online \"FaceTime\" was spent with Ron Paul, and the hours spent reading, spreading, and learning about Ron Paul were right near double the amount of attention paid to Obama, who came in second in terms of FaceTime.  Put another way, if you take every other candidate's face time from both sides of the aisle and combine them, Ron Paul has almost exactly half the hours of FaceTime they do, or about 33% of total Presidential campaign FaceTime.\n\nI spoke with Susan Ferranti at Compete and asked how they actually arrived at these numbers (in terms of which sites were tracked for engagement). She told me that they only included MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and the candidates' own campaign sites. This means that the hordes of blogs covering the candidates and the news coverage that exponentially spirals out from the attention recieved at social media could not only explode the amount of FaceTime recieved by Ron Paul, but all the candidates involved in online campaigning.\nOne of the questions answered by this study is \"Does social media have an effect on campaign results?\" I think it is safe to say we all suspected it did.  Whether or not it will influence the vote has yet to be determined, but the empirical evidence seems to say that there is a direct relationship between the involvement and activity of the candidate's base and the amount of attention paid to that candidate by the general public.\nOne thing that is not addressed by the study (largely because the issue is outside the scope of the study) has to do with the actual engagement of the candidate with the the potential voters. The study focuses on the reverse, how much attention the public is paying attention to the candidate. The problem is that with all that attention, voters will be looking for a place to find the individual voice of those candidates.  Like I've mentioned elsewhere, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Mike Gravel, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich and Mitt Romney have been the only folks to really personally engage the public using their blogs or social media presence.  All other front-runners (or bottom-tiers, for that matter) rely on campaign staff or pre-packaged message to reach the public.\nMy guess is that the Old Media method for selling a focus-group tested pre-packaged bill of goods won't work in the next campaign cycle, and we're certainly seeing here the diminished value of that in this study for this campaign cycle.\nCompete came other quite interesting conclusions analyzing the movement of FaceTime between candidates from month to month:\nAside from Ron Paul, Mitt Romney was the only other leading candidate from either party to get more than 40% of his total FaceTime on sites other than his official website in October. One area where Romney is leading all candidates is in the number of videos posted on Youtube; 452 at last count.\nFred Thompson missed his opportunity to capitalize on the momentum he had early in the summer, when his FaceTime was growing, when he delayed entering the race. After announcing his candidacy in September, Thompson\u2019s FaceTime careened 73% in October when his campaign stumbled out of blocks and GOP voters, in search of a conservative favorite, kicked Thompson\u2019s tires and apparently moved on.\nMike Huckabee was the GOP flavor-of-the-month in October and benefited the most from Thompson\u2019s struggles. Huckabee\u2019s FaceTime surged 92% in October, pulling from Thompson, Romney and Rudy Giuliani who all saw drops in their time with voters.\nCompared with the fluid GOP race, the Democratic contest has been very consistent in terms of FaceTime, with little movement among the candidates. Barack Obama leads all rivals and has steadily drawn roughly 38% of all Democratic FaceTime since March. It will be interesting to see next month whether Obama or John Edwards can capitalize on Hillary Clinton\u2019s recent stumbles and get voters to spend more time considering them as viable alternatives.\nCandidates who are struggling to get FaceTime with voters are also having difficulty raising enough money to compete in the race. Sam Brownback dropped out of the contest last month after drawing the least FaceTime among the GOP rivals for months. Could candidates such as Ton Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson be next? Dodd and Hunter, like Brownback, have been largely unsuccessful at reaching voters beyond their own websites.\nPolitical consultants, analysts and candidates should take note: you can no longer be unplugged and involved in government!\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/12/10/study-shows-ron-paul-brigade-is-actually-effective/>