The online portion of political campaigns was not a dominating issue during this election, despite candidates spending historical amounts to get their message out.
Lisa Diane and Mark Malseed of OhMyGov.com write, “As part of our ongoing series on political websites and social media usage, OhMyGov.com set out to grade the website of each candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010.”
Diane and Malseed focus on design, calls to action, social media, platform and bio, and engagement, the five aspects they use to determine how well websites work.
OhMyGov.com gave Republican Marco Rubio’s and Democrat Kendrick Meek’s websites the highest rating. Independent Charlie Crist’s website was not listed. Gubernatorial candidates Alex Sink and Rick Scott’s websites were also given the highest rating.
New Media Campaigns Lead Project Manager Clay Schossow told The Florida Independent in June that a successful online political campaign integrates YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter.
Schossow writes, “As election day nears, I can’t overstate the importance for campaigns to have a presence with Google Ads. One of the really nice parts of Google Ads is that they’re relatively inexpensive and can get a campaign good coverage for a tiny percentage of their media budget.”
The Miami Herald Naked Politics blog indicates that “Google reports an uptick in searches for election-related information, as well as increased views of political videos on YouTube.” Naked Politics offers some “interesting factoids” about how the state’s high-profile campaigns are playing out online.
Earlier this month, Malseed wrote:
Republicans in Congress, already far outpacing their Democratic rivals in social media popularity, widened that lead significantly between May and August this year, according to a study released today.
The surge in social media popularity by GOP incumbents, as measured in the paper by OhMyGov Research, further fuels speculation that the November elections could bring about a change in power on Capitol Hill.
