Social Media Stats for the Presidential Candidates

Over at the Personal Democracy Forum techPresident you can find some great stats on the use of social media by the presidential candidates.

You can get a look at stats on:

• MySpace -- Total Friends Count
• Facebook -- Total Supporters Count
• YouTube -- Total Views Per Day Count (nice!)
• Technorati -- Total blog mentions per candidate name per day
• Eventful -- Total number of "demands"
• Meetup -- Total meet up members
• Hitwise -- Traffic to each candidate website

From the looks of these stats, the big winners are Obama and Paul. Since Ron Paul is next on my list for analysis, it will be interesting to see what is happening there. Many are talking/blogging about Paul's use of the web -- and how might that translate into votes.

Actually, that's the big question for everyone isn't it? At the end of the day, total friends, supporters, views per day, blog mentions, demands, site visits or total members won't matter if the people involved don't VOTE.

Several reporters have asked me how effective all of this. If I was working for a campaign I'd say VERY! But, I'm not. The reality is ... who knows? This hasn't really been done before (remember, Ho-Ho? he opened up the web to the political world, but at the time he had a website, and blog and was using this new thing called "meetup" to generate buzz...the tools the candidates are using now weren't around when he was running) so how do you measure effectiveness? You can't. Not right now. After the primaries we will know a lot more.