• by Andrew Hazen , October 30, 2008

An increasingly large percentage of internet users -- mostly young, male, well-educated and tech-savvy -- have been turning to social media websites to get their news, tell their stories and debate their opinions.

If the Web was a war zone, the social media community would be the place for hand-to-hand combat. Web sites like Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us catering to this prime selling demo are considered fair game for news, educated discussions and debates among influential potential voters.

The campaigns are well aware of this phenomenon. Still, they have to grapple with questions about whether they should intervene to compensate for a lack of positive social media information and discussion about them.

Which campaign is winning this war? We used our new social media measuring and monitoring tool Prime Buzz to find out how Barack Obama, John McCain and their official websites are faring on both popular and niche social media destinations. We also sought to gain insight into the users' opinions and campaigns' tactics.

To get a sense of social media community's direction, we went to the big names like Digg, Google Blog Search, YouTube and Yahoo Answers. Not surprisingly, we saw Obama's presence drastically outweighed that of McCain, both in terms of the politicians' official websites and individual name references in blog posts, story comments, etc.

YouTube users had posted 534,000 videos through Oct. 17 featuring Obama, nearly two times as the 297,000 for McCain. MySpace and Facebook produced similar results; MySpace alone turned up more than 2.5 million Obama references in user profiles versus less than 1 million for McCain.

There is no way to tell if any of these mentions are positive or negative, though we strongly suspect that Obama supporters are just more vocal amid the growing trend of posting one's political alliances on MySpace and Facebook profiles.

In all, Prime Visibility analyzed more than 25 popular, politically independent, social media websites and Obama tended to dominate the great majority of them.

Are average social media users more likely to vote for Obama or, by function of their age, speak their minds in cyberspace? Maybe it is just a matter of Obama's campaign simply doing a better job of promoting him within this new intellectual medium?

The answer is most likely all of the above, since we will never truly know the source of any of the content appearing on these user-generated content sites.

While the full impact of either campaign's efforts within the social media space may play a relatively small role in this election, it is clear that user-generated content has established itself as an increasingly significant medium to interact with, gauge and even shape voter's opinions.