TechPresident: Tracking Candidate Use of MySpace, YouTube, AdSense

TechPresident is a new online project tracking and aggregating information about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media.  Though consisting of more Democratic Party aligned contributors than anyone else, the group’s research has already resulted in some fascinating revelations.

Candidates’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo! ads are the primary things being watched on the site so far.  The sidebar of the site displays the growth of each candidate’s friends list on MySpace.  Barack Obama is in the lead and growing fastest among Democrats, Texan Ron Paul is in the same position (noting a statistical anomaly otherwise favoring Mitt Romney) among Republicans.  A post from yesterday titled “YouTube: Who Gets It?” charts the candidates’ use of that medium.  All the Democratic candidates except Dennis Kucinich (who also believes government sponsored jet contrails are used to control the weather) have official channels on YouTube, while only Mitt Romney does among Republicans.

Among other interesting findings are that only six candidates have purchased search engine keyword ads and Republicans are doing a much better job of it.  Only Republicans are buying ads on Yahoo! as well as Google and only Republicans are reported to be buying ads for searches for their opponents’ names.

TechPresident is a project of the Personal Democracy Forum.  Other contributors include Zack Exley, Director of Online Organizing and Communications, Kerry/Edwards ’04, Mike Turk, former e-campaign director of the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney 2004, Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, FastCompany.com, video blogging star Steve Garfield and Ruby Sinreich, of NetCentricCampaigns.com among others.

If you’re interested in viewing all the Presidential Candidates’ videos on YouTube, embedded below are the RSS feeds of all their official channels according to TechPresident.  (Disclosure: The service used to display the videos is provided by SplashCast, my employer.  It’s also the only way I know to display all these relevant videos. Click the guide button to see the full list.)

See also BlogtheCampaign08, another group project tracking social media in the Presidential election. That one is made up largely of web 2.0 consultants readers here may be familiar with.

http://web.splashcast.net/p/