Looks like the Internet and Politics are here to stay - I wonder what the metrics will be?  SmartMobs has an intereting post about a New York Times article on how politics is changing due to the Internet.  Truth is that SmartMobs just pointed out the article - I’ll comment on it here.

Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.

That’s going to be interesting how this plays out.   I can imagine there will need to be good metrics on email subscriptions, RSS Feeds, and- the ability to track a lead back to showing up at a rally and …all the way up to the voting booth.   Hmm.. would I love a job like that.    The problem is I’d have to be openly political and you can’t do that and work for a corporation, there’s too many potential issues around it.

Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.

TV, Newspapers, Cable budget’s slashed!  Hmm…..what happens when more and more of the advertising money the Democrats and Republican are spending on Mainstream Media go into the Internet instead.   For one thing, in 5 -10 years, the Internet WILL BECOME THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA - and the roles will be reversed.  

That’s going to make for some interesting mergers and acquisitions in the next couple of years - we’re just seeing the beginning of it.

Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.

We’ll want better metrics on Podcast Downloads than is possible with today’s metrics; the best we can get right now is FeedBurner.  You know what’s kinda weird about that…Feedburner handles many feeds - and internally, they can look at what anyone’s doing with subscribers……… so there’s going to be a need to make sure what political campaign information is kept truly privite (and when you run it via FeedBurner - they can know what the numbers are internally - it’s not encrypted, in other words - so Politically…I’d think you’d want to ask FeedBurner to make sure their own people can’t see the numbers while troubleshooting and maintaing the feeds).

Certainly, the Internet was a significant factor in 2004, particularly with the early success in fund-raising and organizing by Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender. But officials in both parties say the extent to which the parties have now recognized and rely on the Internet has increased at a staggering rate over the past two years.

Calling all Web Metrics Analysts who can make sense of the data.

The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans.

This means, aides said, rethinking every assumption about running a campaign: how to reach different segments of voters, how to get voters to the polls, how to raise money, and the best way to have a candidate interact with the public. In 2004, John Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and his party’s vice presidential candidate, spent much of his time talking to voters in living rooms in New Hampshire and Iowa; now he is putting aside hours every week to videotape responses to videotaped questions, the entire exchange posted on his blog.

Makes sense for John Edwards to spend more time on the Internet.  John, think Podcasts…Vidcasts, these are downloaded more and more and have a way of spreading virally.

Analysts said that the Internet appeared to be a particularly potent way to appeal to new, young voters, a subject of particular interest to both parties in these politically turbulent times. In the 2004 campaign, 80 percent of people between the age of 18 and 34 who contributed to Mr. Kerry’s campaign made their contribution online, Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.

This is the audience to go after - young voters actually have the most to gain or loose from the next couple of elections - but young voters have been the least motivated to vote.  Changes here will create a shift in who gets elected.

For their part, Democrats have set up decoy Web sites to post documents with damaging information about Republicans. They described this means of distribution as far more efficient than the more traditional slip of a document to a newspaper reporter.

Last year I did some work for a client of reputation management via monitoring negative comments on search engines - we managed to show the amount of negative press for a company or person then the company I worked with would create positive press releases and pages to get the clients positive messages out and push down the negative press to the second and third pages of the search results.   I see this kind of monitoring as becoming more and more in demand in the future -and becoming more sophisticated than it is today.   For a company that i know does this, go to here.

"All these consultants are still trying to make sense of what blogs are, and I think by 2008 they are going to have a pretty good idea: They are going to be like, ‘We’re hot and we’re hip and we’re bloggin’,’ " said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos. "But by 2008, the blogs are going to be so institutionalized, it’s not going to be funny."

That’s hopefully not going to happen - if that happens, those blogs will become just part of the regular marketing mix rather than a free voice.

Democratic leaders arguing that the Internet is today for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans 10 years ago. "This new media becomes much more important to us because conservatives have been more dominant in traditional media," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network. "This stuff becomes really critical for us."

You’ll need good metrics for all of this.