It turns out that of the 26 Senate candidates operating a campaign blog during the midterm election the number of candidates achieving electoral success (13) and the number ending up as losing candidates (13) was even. What does this tell us?
Erin Telling of the Bivings Report has followed the Senate race closely and is surprised by the results.
‘Blogs did not play the effectual role in this cycle’s election that I expected it would.’
‘The results indicate that there are many factors that contribute to a campaign victory. The presence of a campaign blog or aggressive campaign Web strategy may contribute to the outcome of the election, but will not be the deciding factor.’ Telling says.
The results from The Bivings Report comparison of winning bloggers v. loosing bloggers shows further that the Democratic candidate blogs fared slightly better than the Republican candidate blogs.
What we need to do now is to compare the differences between the blogs of the winning candidates and the losers to see if we can find common factors in the blogs that had an impact on the election result.
While it is obvious that blogs will never be the sole factor of electoral success, we still need to find a way to understand how to achieve maximum impact through this communication tool.