Governor

Pat McCrory: B-

The Republican candidate has a sharp-looking site, with a layout that draws the reader’s eyes to the interchangable dominant feature. The site also integrates videos into that dominant feature effectively.

Like most candidates, McCrory has a Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Each is very well populated with content uploaded over the course of the campaign. McCrory allowed comments on his 13 YouTube videos, which drew both positive and negative comments, but leaned toward the former. No comments could be found on any of his 67 Flickr photos.

McCrory also utilized Eventful, a little-known application used to keep up with schedules. The campaign uploaded 107 events, but not a single soul signed up to “watch” or attend the event. The Eventful page is difficult to navigate.

Bev Perdue: C-

The Perdue campaign also has a dynamic dominant feature. She also has a Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, but they are much more difficult to find on the page — buried at the bottom. The Facebook page goes to a 404, which is a big fail. But the YouTube and Flickr are much more populated than are McCrory’s.

Perdue turned off commenting for the 85 YouTube videos, but not the 83 Flickr photos. Still, no community was cultivated.

Senate

Elizabeth Dole: D

Following the trend, the Republican candidate’s campaign has a dynamic dominant feature that incorporates videos. Most of the rotating box’s pages, however, are very text heavy. Her social media components are nowhere to be found on the front page, however. Users must click on “Contact us” to find the buttons.

Her Facebook page has one serious drawback: It is an actual person, not a candidate page. Users must friend Dole to see her page, which costs her hundreds of views. Her Flickr page is well-stocked with 52 photos, but her YouTube page has just 13 videos — all advertisements. None received any comments. She is the only candidate to have a Delicious page, but no links were ever posted. It seems like she was headed in the right direction, but couldn’t quite execute.

Kay Hagan: B

The Democrat’s site has no dominant feature, so users’ eyes are drawn every-which-way. Her social media features are on the main page, and eye-catching if users scroll to the bottom of the screen. Her Facebookpage plays up her connection to Barack Obama, and her YouTube has a mix of advertisements and “on the campaign trail” dispatches. She also has a Blip.TV page, but it is unnavigable.

Hagan is the only candidate in this bunch with a Twitter page. It has 88 followers and has drawn a few reply tweets. She did not exploit the platform, though, never reply tweeting or trying to start a conversation. Still, Hagan earns points for being out there.

U.S. House

A previous post has been written about the David Price v. B.J. Lawson race.

Lawson: B+

Lawson also has a Twitter, with similar shortcomings to Hagan’s.

Price: F

Price has nothing.

So, no candidate performed well enough to receive an A. Each campaign’s Web site had obvious areas of improvement, most of which would have been easy fixes. It is a start, however, that just about every candidate reached out into social media. They all suffered from a lack of community fostering, which should have been easy due to the heated nature of the 2008 races.

Look for social media networking to be even more important, and better done, in 2012.

An excerpt from the article:

“Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations covering them.

For many viewers, the 2008 election has become a kind of hybrid in which the dividing line between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture, has been all but obliterated.”

The Washington Post will be using Vote Monitor 2008 to send and receive dispatches from around the country. Readers can tweet @PostVoteMonitor to send news from their precincts. “We want to know what you encounter — from long lines to voting machine issues, registration errors to voter intimidation — in order to show potential voting problems as they arise across the country,” the Post’s investigations blog says.

A similar project has been launched by TwitterVoteReport.com.

Here’s the group’s YouTube video explaining their project:

From their site:

Including “#votereport” in your tweet is enough to get your report tracked by Twitter Vote Report. But the more details you can stuff in, the better. So, for example, include in your Twitter post:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

A blue marker means straight Democratic endorsements. Red means straight Republican. Green means a split ticket.

Andrew Perrin

Sociology professor Andrew Perrin leads the class, called  ”Citizenship and Society in the United States.” His students blog at unc6608.wordpress.com, which contains “ up-to-the-day ideas, commentary, and information about the U.S. Presidential race, the race for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Elizabeth Dole, and the North Carolina governor’s race, all in 2008,” according to the site’s About page. 

Posts range from criticisms of John McCain’s patriotic campaign focus to analysis of North Carolina as a battleground state. 

The blog counts for 25 percent of the students’ final grades.

Word on the street is that Obama waited until now to release the app so that Republican candidate John McCain could not develop a similar one.

The application sorts the user’s contacts by state, and encourages the user to call friends in swing states and encourage them to vote Obama. It also gives news updates.

McCain has a similar feature on his Web site, allowing supporters to e-mail their friends or participate in a phone tree during daytime hours.

Even a Lawson internal poll shows him down big, 56 percent to 31 percent.

But an even more uneven battle is in social media. Lawson 1, Price 0.

Lawson has a Web site rich with multimedia content and a conspicuous plate of links to social networking tools. (See right).

His videos are frequently updated with eye-catching headlines and still-frames. He’s accessible on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn, the top trendy social networking sites.

It seems to have paid off. As of Ot. 1, he has 563 supporters on Facebook,  500 friends on MySpace and 41 followers on Twitter.

Price has also made posted some video, but the last one was in May, and they just beg readers to skip over them. (See right)

Price has made one forays into social media, but has made no effort to promote it on his Web site. Still, he has 629 supporters on Facebook. Who knows how many he would have if he tried?

We’ll see how these efforts translate into young voter results come November.

Beckwith is asking for readers to submit questions for Obama/Biden. From the message:

“Have a question for them? Send it to dome@newsobserver.com and we may use it. Include your name, age, town where you live, occupation, party affiliation and a daytime phone number where you can be reached as well as a photograph of yourself. “

Dome is also looking for readers to weigh in on the debate as it happens. From the Facebook message:

“Presuming the debates happen as planned tomorrow, we’ll be writing about them in the N&O. We’re looking for a few volunteers — D’s, R’s, L’s and independents — who plan on watching the debates to get their reaction afterward. Interested? Send your name and a daytime or evening phone number to dome@newsobserver.com.

Also, if you know of any debate parties going on tomorrow, let us know and we may drop by!”

Under the Dome, a regular column in the N&O since 1934, has morphed into an online community surrounding N.C. politics.

A lot of it is Obama’s outspending of Republican candidate John McCain in North Carolina by 22 percent per week. 

But the key to Obama’s success might also be through his domination of online tools in campaigning. Between Jan. 1 and the May primary election, 100,122 people between ages 18 and 25 registered to vote. As of last week, young voters (18 to 29) prefer Obama 60 percent to 32 percent.

Now, Obama’s draw can’t be all because of his online prowess. But he sure knows how to reach them.

Journalism.org released a report Monday analyzing how the two candidates utilize online and social networking tools. Some of their key findings:

• Obama beats McCain on MySpace friends by nearly 6-to-1, Facebook supporters by more than 5-to-1, YouTube channel posts by 2-to-1, and YouTube channel subscribers by 11-to-1.
• Obama’s site links to mainstream media news stories more frequently than McCain’s, which tends to bypass the MSM and link to campaign-generated press releases.
• Obama’s site is more rich. The Obama Web site provides far more text by virtue of the extensive archive of Obama’s speeches (in August alone, 50,676 words on Obama’s Web site versus 21,021 on McCain’s). Taking out the speeches by both candidates, Obama’s site still features more words than McCain’s, but they are closer.
• The Obama Web site attracted a 72% share of visits to the two presidential Web sites for the week ending August 30. The percentage is consistent with the traffic since June 28, when Hitwise began measuring usage of the presidential candidate Web sites.

Much like CNN did in the primary debates (Democratic and Republican), WRAL is asking its site’s visitors to submit questions to the gubernatorial debate.

Granted, these are typed, not the YouTube video questions the CNN debates had. CNN and YouTube said they received more than 3,000 submissions for the Democratic debate and 5,000 for the Republican.

But it will be interesting to see how these questions are worked in to the typical MSM-moderated debate queries.

Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory (R) and Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue (D) square off at 7 p.m. today.