Obama, Romney ramp up digital campaigns

We saw the rise of social media as a campaign tool in 2008, when Barack Obama used his network of online supporters to help orgazine, raise money and secure his election. This time around, it’s a tech-savvy president versus a digital newbie. But both parties learned a lesson from the first time around, and are stepping it up a notch with their digital campaigns. “We’ve seen big media battles before. But in money, in woman- and man-hours, and in technical and strategic sophistication, this will be the biggest ever,” explained the Philadelphia Inquirer’s John Timpane. “In a close election, as this promises to be, digital could be decisive.” So far, it appears that Obama has the advantage in this realm. Recent research from Conductor showed that Obama spent twice as much on Google advertising, had eight times more Facebook Likes and five times more Twitter followers than all the Republican primary candidates combined. As MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan noted, “Obama holds a significant head start. The foundation laid in 2008 continues to pay off during his re-election campaign.”

But it’s a good thing for Republicans that Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney’s last major opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, dropped out. Romney appears to be the only one to stand a chance against the digital-literate Obama team. According to the Conductor study, Romney has done the best job of the Republican candidates in controlling his online message: His official site appears on the first page of results for searches about him nearly half the time, and he has several times more Facebook “Likes” than the other Republican candidates. Plus, wife Ann Romney has become a sudden Twitter star and has her own page on Pinterest, while the Obama team made its way to the site just a few weeks ago. So what’s the next platform in the campaign wars going to be? As AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka quipped after the Obama team posted an image of the president teaching Joe Biden to use Twitter, “I think Obama should wait to introduce Biden to Instagram. It seems to have gotten very, very boring in the last hour or so: My feed, at least, is full of pictures of news stories (about Instagram being bought).”

• Obama, Romney camps ready for digital warfare (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• On Twitter, campaigns dog each other with insults (Reuters)

• Campaigns Partner With Social Media Companies (NY Times)

• Romney Fights For Message Control, Obama Outpaces GOP In Digital Reach (MediaPost)

• Santorum Spent $1M on Web Ads, but Super PACs Attacked (ClickZ)

• How Twitter lets politicians route around the media (GigaOm)

• “And This Is How You Send a Direct Message. Whatever You Do, Don’t Do That.” (AllThingsD)

• Social Media And Politics: A Match Made (TV News Check)

• On Twitter, The Primary’s Over and It’s Obama vs. Romney (Mashable)

• Texting offers promise but also peril to campaigns (Associated Press)