Meet the OPOs

Finding the Format That Fits Best

To a large extent, a candidate's online strategy depends on what the campaign perceives as its greatest need. Romney is doing a lot of online videos, many of them excerpts from television appearances and public speeches. Mitt TV launched earlier this year on his Web site, and it includes "channels" such as "Meet Mitt Romney," "Ask Mitt Anything" and "Fun."

"He's the least known of the front-runners, and online video is very important to us," Smith said.

Clinton, too, is doing online videos -- but not for the same reason. She is the best known of the candidates, but the public perception of the former first lady is that she is cold, calculating, impersonal.

"My job is to make sure that her ideas, her persona, who she is, is communicated as directly as possible to people," said Daou, who pointed to the three live webcasts, titled "Let the Conversation Begin," posted on Clinton's site shortly after she announced her candidacy.

Edwards, on the other hand, is inescapable on social networking sites. The former senator has a presence on all the popular "soc-nets" (Flickr, MySpace, Facebook), and he has signed up on the obscure ones, too (vSocial, Blip.tv, 43Things).

"In 2003 and 2004, when campaigning online was still a new thing, the Internet audience was relatively small, and everybody yielded the playing field to the Dean campaign," Gross said. "But the Internet audience is now much more mainstream and much more fragmented. . . . The challenge for everyone now is, how do you get your candidate into this whole new Internet audience?"

And Obama, the candidate to beat on the Web, faces the toughest challenge. Judging by his robust fundraising on MyBarackObama and his numbers of supporters on Facebook and MySpace, he's the most popular candidate online, Republican or Democrat.

But this week the "Barocket," as TechPresident dubbed Obama because of his rapid rise, had his biggest online skirmish yet, and with one of his supporters. After hearing Obama's keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Joe Anthony, a 29-year-old paralegal in Los Angeles, created a MySpace page that carried Obama's name. The page attracted thousands of "friends" -- 35,000 by February, 100,000 by April and nearly 160,000 by Monday night.

For weeks, Anthony said, he had a "good working relationship" with Rospars's online team. But things went sour. Anthony wanted to be compensated for his work on the site. Rospars's team wanted the page's thousands of supporters and control over content. In the end, after much buzz in the blogosphere -- some good, mostly bad -- Rospars created the campaign's own MySpace page.

"We're flying by the seat of our pants," Rospars wrote Wednesday night on Obama's blog, "and establishing new ways of doing things every day. We're going to try new things, and sometimes it's going to work, and sometimes it's not going to work. That's the cost and that's the risk of experimenting."