Brown win shows Dems don't have a monopoly on Web-savvy campaigns

Scott Brown’s majority-grabbing win  of the Massachusetts Senate seat Tuesday night is another tribute to the power of the Web in elections.
 
Brown consistently received more than twice the amount of search interest as his Democratic opponent Martha Coakley, according to Google statistics. And he had more than three times the number of followers on Twitter, more than five times the number of fans on Facebook, and more than nine times as many views of his YouTube videos than Coakley.
 
It wasn’t an accident. Brown spent around 10 percent of its media budget on online advertising—a new record for a political campaign (although that number is just an initial estimate). Some of that money ($145,000, to be exact) paid for Google’s “network blast” tool to spread ads everywhere Massachusetts Internet users went online since last Thursday.

This is not to say that Brown’s online presence clinched his win, but it’s a definite sign that Democrats no longer have the monopoly on Web-savvy campaign skills, as was popular belief after President Barack Obama’s election.
 
With so many closely watched congressional elections coming up this year, Brown may have set the standard for digital out-reach to voters.