Are Bloggers Influencing Political Campaigns?

The answer is a definitely yes. According to many campaign strategists and technology gurus, it is expected that the next frontier will be social networking sites such as MySpace, where some politicians have already started building their presence. Some US political candidates have set up regular online chats and used them to link supporters from various parts of their constituencies.

by BizReport

Nevertheless, as Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Gather.com, a social networking site, says, “it is easy for politicians to preach to the converted, who are already visiting their sites, but to reach the 85 to 90 per cent of people who will never come to the candidate’s website, so they need to be somewhere else.”

The way a political campaign communicates is changing rapidly, with highly targeted email replacing direct mail, advertisements edited on laptops computers, and messages spread with rocket speed – with or without the direct control of the campaigns themselves.

Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, says “The general sense is that politics is about five years behind the commercial uses of the internet.”

It is expected that rapid change is still to come, but official blogs and social networking websites are definitely already part of any effective communication and marketing campaign within the political sphere.