The Internet in Politics

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout Director of Product Marketing

The news has settled down now three weeks after the presidential election,and yet, as I caught up on my reading, Information Week had an interesting article in the November 10th issue on the “Dawn of the Internet Presidency”.  The online version was titled “Obama Election Ushering in First Internet Presidency” and highlighted the revolutionary, strategic use of the Internet as a key element to getting out his message, soliciting advocates and volunteers, as well as contributing to the largest fundraising effort for any presidential candidate to date.

Consider the different ways the Obama campaign used the internet, Web 2.0 and other social networking techniques:

• Official Web site with invitation to become “a member” by creating a MyBO Account on the main page
• Encouraged sharing of email addresses and cell phone numbers, used for sending out regular e-mail and text-message blasts
• Collected donations via the official web site from more than 3 million supports
• Announced his selection of Senator Joe Biden as his Vice-Presidential Candidate via a cell phone text message to their supporters rather than the traditional news conference, rally or press release of by-gone election years
• A custom developed social networking site created by the co-founder of Facebook had over 2.5 million supporters and more than 160,000 regular users. Additionally, there were over 800,000 MySpace friends where supporters could find lists of people to call or visit, personal blogs, user shot videos, etc.
• Twitterholic, a tracking site, determined that the BarackObama Twitter account was the most popular account on the site
• Creative use of Google Maps mashups enabled the Obama volunteers to find local campaign headquarters
• Viewers spent more than 14.5 million hours watching official Obama campaign videos on YouTube (this doesn’t include time spent viewing the “Obama girl” videos or replays of Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin – just imagine the millions of hours that might add!!!

No matter where your political leanings are, most would agree that this election has changed the dynamics in three key ways:

• Volunteerism, participation, education is up; political apathy – if not out, is at least on hiatus
• The use of the Internet and social networking was in large part the mechanism by which the former was accomplished
• the advent of the “smart” phones with Internet access, SMS text messaging, and integrated Google Maps and mashups played a significant role in ease of communications

Because of my experience with NetScout, and my exposure to IT professionals in both enterprises and mobile operators, I can’t help but relate this shift to my day-to-day work.  I think about the social networking, YouTube, and web surfing that may have been done over the last 3 to 12 months over corporate enterprise networks by employees wanting to learn more about issues and candidates and I wonder what if any impact on the corporate networks this activity had and how IT staff monitors, troubleshoots, and manages this activity in the enterprise environment.  NetScout’s solutions have long provided packet-flow views and insights into this type of activity for pinpointing and proactively monitoring business service impacting issues before they become disruptive.

And I also consider the increased use and activity to cell phones over the mobile infrastructure and if it helped in any way to increase average revenue per subscriber during these months.  And if the predictions are true that these new ideas and uses were so effective for this campaign, then enterprises and future candidates will need to adopt similar grass roots kinds of strategies as new avenues of reaching customers, which in turn will further add to mobile network use and subscriber revenue.  Subscriber churn is directly related to services and network performance, both of which NetScout solutions identify and help mobile operators to monitor and analyze for maintaining optimal service delivery.

We want to know about experiences at your organization – did your network see additional YouTube traffic during the weeks leading up to the election?  Did you by any chance log into candidate web sites, Facebook or MySpace pages?  Com’on now, you can tell us, did you download an “Obama girl” video or watch Tina Fey???  What is your company’s policy on employee recreational use of the network?  We are curious – let us know.