How Well Networked Are Political Campaign Blogs?

Erin has done a great job of reviewing the features and content of the various blogs being run by 2006 candidates for the United States Senate. Her research got me thinking about how influential/successful these campaign blogs actually are. How many people are reading them? How many people are linking to them? How well networked are they? Are they working? These questions are pretty much impossible to answer in an academically defensible way: we'd need access to the logs of all the campaign blogs to answer adequately. We're left picking through anecdotes.

So I decided to use the blog search engine Technorati to find some of these anecedotes. Without further ado, following are the criteria I looked at followed by the results.

Blog Rank. Technorati has a feature that ranks most blogs in their database based purely on the number of other blogs that link to them. The thought behind this is that links are the most effective way of we have of measuring the influence of a blog. On the right, I've included the Technorati rank icon for our modest company blog, The Bivings Report.

Site Rank. Some of the campaigns  had ranks for their main website URL in addition to one for their blog. I have included that rank, even know it isn't that good an indication of the influence of the campaign blog itself.

Links to Main Site. The is the number of pure links to the main campaign website. If one blog linked to a site 150 times, that is 150 links. I think this is more a measure of how much the candidate is being talked about and not neccassirly an indication that their blog is influential.

In Technorati. This is a simple measure of whether the blogs are doing a good job of getting their content in Technorati. If Technorati hadn't grabbed new content in the last 15 days, I counted it as a no. This is indicated in my chart.

Claimed. Most serious bloggers sign up for Technorati accounts and claim their blog on the network. I looked at whether the campaigns had bothered to claim their own blogs.

Here is a table showing the results of my anecdotal research. I only looked at blogs that had RSS feeds. The table is sorted based on the Technorati rank of each blog.

Candidate	Blog Rank (Blog links)	Site Rank (Blog Links)	Links to Main Site	In Technorati	Claimed
Rick Santorum (R-PA)	60,139 (49)	N/A	939	Yes	Yes
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)	61,655 (48)	61,655 (48)*	171	Yes	No
Jack Carter (D-NV)	177,675 (19)	N/A	594	Yes	No
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)	344,127 (10)	15,263 (152)	1,828	No (23 days)	Yes
Pete Ashdown (D-UT)	478,084 (7)	N/A	314	No (115 days)	Yes
Allen McCulloch (R-NM)	929,716 (3)	N/A	9	Yes	No
Allan Lichtman (D-MD)	1,669,958 (0)	N/A	41	No (284 days)	No
Jon Tester (D-MT)	1,669,958 (0)	18,148 (131)	567	Yes	No
James Webb (D-VA)	1,669,958 (0)	N/A	33	No (122 days)	No
Bob Casey (D-NJ)	N/A	N/A	266	No	No
Tom Kean, Jr. (R-NJ)	N/A	N/A	124	No	No
Edward Kennedy (D-MA)	N/A	N/A	204	No	No
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)	N/A	N/A	206	No	No
Mike McGavick (R-WA)	N/A	N/A	443	Yes	No
Barbara Ann Radnofsky (D-TX)	N/A	N/A	367	No	No
Richard Tarrant (R-CT)	N/A	N/A	72	No	No

*Sheldon Whitehouse's main site is a blog. Thus for him Site Rank and Blog Rank are the same.

Here are some highlights from this quick study:

• Only 44% of the blogs we looked at had been indexed by Technorati in the last 15 days. And many of these blogs that had been indexed weren't being done so regularly. Seems a lot of campaigns are unfamilar with pinging.
• Only 18% of the campaigns have claimed their blog on Technorati.
• Generally speaking, these campaign blogs are not linked to that much by other blogs. It was surprising.

If you click through on some of the blogs listed above, you'll see that most are updated regularly. The campaigns are working hard to create content for these things. But they clearly aren't doing a good job of promoting them. Speculating a bit, I would say they are failing on three fronts:

(1) Campaigns haven't mastered some of the technical aspects of blog promotion. This is evidenced by the fact that most of these blogs aren't getting indexed regularly by blog search engines and most campaigns haven't claimed their blog on Technorati. If people can't find your posts, they aren't going to link to them.

(2) Campaigns aren't networking effectively with other bloggers. I know lots of candidates have conference calls with bloggers. And I also know you can't judge the effectiveness of blog outreach efforts based solely on the results above. However, a lot of blogging is building online relationships one blogger at a time. You exchange emails with other bloggers. You link to them. You comment on their blogs. You add them to your blogroll. Given the results shown above, I can't imagine that most of the campaign blogs are doing a good job at building these sorts of relationship. I suspect a lot of them are operating in a bit of a vacuum.

(3) Campaigns aren't producing compelling content. Any successful blogger you talk to will say you earn links by creating good content. Write something great and people will find it and link to it. Click through on the blogs above yourself and see what you think about the content.