“The YouTube Election”

This year, we have undoubtedly seen Social Media (and the internet in general) play a heavier role than it has ever played before in a presidential election. Facebook was only 9 months old the last time we cast our ballots for America’s highest office (and had a different URL – remember thefacebook.com?), MySpace had a mere 5 million users (it hit 100 million over 14 months ago) and YouTube was still three months away from entering our lives.

The effect has been huge. I would say it is akin to the Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960 that famously “changed politics for good.” Not at all because one candidate is “getting it” more than the other, but because from here on out, things will never be the same.

Reuters discusses the importance the web will play in the election as it relates to traditional TV coverage, citing a Nielsen Media study released last week that suggests the correlation between TV watching and web use at home. The study found that thirty percent of online activity at home happens while users are watching TV.

CNN is expecting 1 billion hits to their website today.

The article also mentions Current TV – which is essentially like “watching the internet on TV,” as my boyfriend describes it. I watched Current TV’s “Hack the Debate” coverage of the first debate – where people could use Twitter to publish comments directly to the network and Current TV would scroll them on the bottom of the screen live in real time – and I very much enjoyed the broadcast as a really successful mashup of online and offline tools.

There are lots of resources to be watching today, from news channels and news sites to blogs to Twitter feeds to the official sites of the candidates… so choose your source and stay tuned!