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Senator Barack Obama sends supporters a text message announcing Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate. Senator Hillary Clinton holds live online web-chats with her voting public. 62-year-old Democratic Senator from Connecticut Chris Dodd asks visitors to his website to suggest their own play-lists, which he will then add to his “Dodd-Pod” and use as a soundtrack during television interviews. Clearly, politicians have a grasp on the importance of using so-called “new media” to their advantage during the campaign season. Hence the growing importance of candidate favorability among those blade-tongued renegades: that group known as the bloggers.

A new website that tracks the U.S. political climate in the online blogging world has found that candidate’s official websites have little to no impact on voters because of their perceived lack of credibility. Presidentialwatch08.com compares mainstream media coverage of the 2008 election with 300 of the most influential conservative and liberal online blogs, demonstrating linkages as well as discrepancies. The offshoot of this is that the website, created by Linkfluence, the U.S. affiliate of the French social media company RTGI, is able to measure how accurately the candidate’s messages are being portrayed or distorted as they filter through the world wide web.

When the candidates campaign in real life, they go to rallies and schools where people are," said Anthony Hamelle, vice president of RTGI, in a January 2008 article from adweek.com. "But on the Internet, they wait for people to come to them and that doesn't work. Online, you have to go where people are and you have to meet people."

Mitch Stoller, a partner at Group SJR, a New York-based strategy firm that has joined with Linkfluence to provide consulting services to marketers, political campaigns, and advocacy groups, feels the problem lies in the way campaigns market their message as if its something to be sold rather than an idea to be believed.
"There is nothing more important in the blogosphere than the authenticity of content and whether it is interesting," Stoller said in the AdWeek article. "The candidates' Web sites seem to be driven by an advertising message. But that doesn't work in the blogosphere, which requires a more idiosyncratic voice. The candidates have not tapped in to this."
The site works by locating the "virtual town halls, schools, homes and churches of the Internet where people meet, debate and influence one another."

The question for campaigns now seems whether or not the idea that these forms of new media are as influential as the good ol' American staple-TV.

"The jury is still out on whether the blogs can compete with the credibility, accountability and longevity of television over the last four decades," David Mercer, a Democratic political strategist who has worked on five presidential elections including the 2004 John Kerry and the 2000 Al Gore campaigns, told AdWeek. "Because we are entering this new age of the Internet, it is still a monitoring exercise. And because of the quick pace of the campaigns, there has yet to be a true harnessing of the Internet."

Marketing analyst Seth Godin is also quoted in the AdWeek article, making the case as to why politician's websites are inherently flawed. "It is very easy for a candidate to spend a lot of time and money tweaking their Web sites, but that doesn't make it a vibrant part of the political conversation," Godin said. "The paradox is that what it takes to succeed in the conversation online are things that often get in the way of getting the majority of American citizens to vote for you. You need transparency, controversy and candor, which are things the presidential candidates are taught to avoid."

Political Strategist Mike Connell, whose clients include John McCain for President and the Republican National Committee, told the AdWeek reporter that while he thinks tracking blog linkages may provide some useful information, a presidential campaign may not always want to reveal to what extent it is directly responsible for messages appearing in the blogosphere .

"Sometimes people have a habit of thinking of a blog like a megaphone and that is how you contribute to the conversation," Connell says. "But that is not always how it is done; Having your message percolate up from the grassroots through the blogs has emerged as an effective strategy as well."

Campaigns are not always the best source of information, Connell said. "Many times a message will have more credibility coming from a third party, so a campaign doesn't always want to be the source of the information," he says. "There is a certain merit in independent sources. Sometimes you just want a positive message attributed to a third party because it has more credibility that way. We are talking about more than simply planting rumors and other dark arts here."

The true worth of Presidentialwatch08.com may prove its ultimate use as singling out and communicating with influential opinion leaders.

"This is the kind of thing that helps you scale your outreach efforts," said Peter Kim, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "Consumers say they look to the recommendations of friends and family when making a purchasing decision. We see consumers looking online for peer recommendations on message boards and in chat rooms. I would say the same information applies to elections."

Though blogs have become a solid fixture in modern political communication, less is known about their readers and the way information portrayed on blogs affects their opinions. In the fall of 2006, political scientists representing about 30 universities conducted a survey of 16,000 Americans called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The following statistics were taken from an LA Times article by two political scientists who helped to conduct the study.

The survey asked whether or not participants read blogs, and if they did, which ones. About 34 percent of the respondents said they read blogs, but a mere 14 percent named at least one blog with a political focus.

Compared with those participants who didn't read political blogs, they are more likely to have a college degree and are more interested in politics. They are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, rather than as independents, and are more likely to call themselves liberals or conservatives rather than moderates. Political blog readers are more likely to vote, give money to candidates or simply talk about politics. They genuinely enjoy politics and engaging in political discussion.

As far as race, gender, and socioeconomic status goes, no significant statistic separates blog readers from the general population. This passion for politics seems to be the true distinguishing factor of those who read online political blogs and those who don’t.

Blog readers tend to visit websites that advocate their particular viewpoint. The study found that 94 percent of blog readers choose to read postings on only one side of the political spectrum, with 90 percent of both liberals and conservatives visiting blogs geared toward their affiliation. Even among those who identified as “moderates,” 89 percent read exclusively left or right wing blogs.

To determine the extent of polarization among blog readers, the study constructed a gauge of political ideology based on responses to their feelings on the topics of stem cell research, abortion, the Iraq war, the minimum wage and capital gains tax cuts. Researchers then mapped the responses, finding liberal blog readers clustered on the extreme left, while conservative blog readers seemed bunch in the far right, with little if any overlap on the issues. The differences ideologically between liberal versus conservative blog readers were far more extreme than those between liberals who watch CNN and conservatives who watch Fox News, according to those professors who wrote the LA Times article.

The study appears to conclude that while political blogs have become an important part of modern communication between citizens, they lack the potential to dramatically affect the voting public because in most instances bloggers are preaching to their own choir. Those who read blogs are already likely very involved and up-to-date on their political information, and are likely seeking out only those websites that bolster or legitimize their existing viewpoint. The main way blogs can affect voters is by uncovering new information, which will then disperse through the public and the less-partisan mainstream media (as was the case when the Huffington Post, a left-wing political blog, broke the story about Senator Obama’s comment pertaining to small-town people clinging to “guns and religion.”)

As far as politics in general, the effect of blogs may be less geared toward persuasion and more toward mobilization, the study finds. Bloggers may inspire their readers to become active in supporting candidates in their communities, to donate money to a campaign, or to get their friends and family members to register to vote. Those who read blogs appear to be active in promoting causes, candidates, or issues within their society. Only time will tell how new technologies spawned of the information age will continue to alter the terms of communication between the government and the governed.