National Popular Vote Had a Whole New Meaning in the 2008 Presidential Election

At Webbed Marketing, we like numbers – all kinds of stats, metrics, comparisons – anything showing detailed results.  A year ago, we developed a “scorecard” to help measure online presence for our clients. The scorecard is made up of 30 different metrics illustrating the visibility of a site/page in the search engines (SEO) and the visibility of a “brand” in online conversations (social media outlets).  It’s our Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 online buzz measurement tool on steroids.

It was only natural that we evaluated final scorecards for the 2008 Presidential Election final candidates: Barack Obama and John McCain. (We look at numbers only – no personal political opinions found here.) After closely analyzing all 30 metrics from links to the site to mentions on MySpace and in blogs, there was a trend. Barack Obama led every metric by at least 15% for an overall average of 40%+ over McCain. Even our own Webbed-O-Meter tool measured an 80 for Obama and a 67 for McCain (out of a total score of 100).

It’s a fact that Obama’s Facebook page is still the most popular profile with 3,010,722 supporters while McCain only attracted 618,189 supporters.

Could we have predicted the outcome of the election based on the pure volume of the online conversations about the election and its candidates?  Can we draw a correlation to the percentage of buzz Obama received above McCain to the percentage of the popular vote Obama gained? 

Probably not since we are not measuring the tone (negative or positive) of the online communications; however; the results certainly illustrate the impact the Internet had in the 2008 Presidential election and will have in all future elections.

- Amy Marshall

Tags: barack obama, buzz, john mccain, online buzz, webbed o meter