Readers of this blog have no need for another example of how much the Internet is changing political campaigns. The extent, however, that a candidates "Internet Reputation" affects their election is ultimately unmeasurable and as a result, overlooked.
That includes the candidate's Wikipedia profile. According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the 8th most visited website in the US.
With some help from a friend (cough- William Beutler- cough) with greater expertise regarding Wikipedia, I recently acquired some Wikipedia statistics from the month of February for every Congressman in my home state of Indiana.
The number is how many times the page was viewed in February. The link is to the statistics.
429 -- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Pete_Visclosky
1042
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Baron_Hill
1069
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Steve_Buyer
1250
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Joe_Donnelly
1335
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Brad_Ellsworth
1873
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Mark_Souder
2419
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Andre_Carson
2456
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Mike_Pence
19648
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Dan_Burton
Note that 5th District Congressman Dan Burton's profile saw an additional 17,500 views in February from January, a two-day spike as a result of the Clemens hearings.
For more even more enlightening detail, I pulled the chart below of Burton's Wikipedia traffic in the month of April. In April, Burton's Primary campaign was in full swing (election was May 5). The two big spikes came on April 14th and April 28th. On the 14th, Burton's opponent began his TV campaign. On the 28th, the Indianapolis Star ran an editorial about the race critical of Burton.
Sometimes a candidate can generate a buzz offline with a good Internet operation. But also, candidates need to keep in mind that they will generate online activity by offline actions. Offline campaign activities like direct mail blitzes, TV stories, and campaign commercials will result in additional searches on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo- both of which generally give Wikipedia top billing. You need to make sure that your voters are finding positive information.
Pay attention to Wikipedia- your voters are.
Comments
With the vast majority of
With the vast majority of active net users being young liberals the tilt to Wiki and other open places simply will make it not a reliable source.
Google bombing by left side sites plus many other tactics just will keep up due to the disparity of their numbers active on the web, including large groups on the social network sites.
The web will be best utilized with state of the art candidate web sites and third party groups to put forward the conservative message and facts.
Fund raising is another area to be addressed and not at the candidate level but combined efforts also.
With good sites and RSS feeds a more informed base can be out there. Right now you have to go to dozens of sites to try to fish out all the information on your own and the national party sites are frankly a waste of pixels.
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