Washington - If the US election in 2008 has proven anything, it's that whoever has the upper hand in using the internet to his or her advantage will probably walk away with a victory.

More than newspapers, television, phone calls, or door-to-door canvassing, the internet has both energised and mobilised voters like never before in the US, and in the process it has proven to be a tool that no candidate can fail to master going forward.

"The internet is the new television as far as 21st century campaigning is concerned," says Walter Anderson, contributing editor of FamilySecurityMatters. org. More than television, though, Anderson notes, the internet has proven that it has the ability to allow candidates to reach "a larger audience of potential voters" more immediately and with greater interactivity than television ever could.

Just four years ago, those in the US political arena felt that the primary way in which the internet could help with political campaigns was by providing a good means by which to solicit donations. Howard Dean, who ran an ultimately unsuccessful bid to be the Democratic nominee in 2004, is widely cited as the first successful pioneer of soliciting donations on a large scale through the internet.

Barack Obama's team leveraged the lessons of Dean early on and met with extraordinary success. Of course, they came in with the advantage of both a population that was by now used to donating to political causes over the internet and very excited by Obama's personality. Ultimately, though, his team broke all records for using the internet - and e-mail - as a way to build financial support almost wholly online.

His efforts were bolstered by an e-mail campaign that frequently asked for further donations and encouraged donators to spread the word both about the candidate and about how to get involved online.

The best example of just how successful the internet-based support model became was the Obama team's announcement that it raised over 150 million dollars in September alone. All of Obama's competitors tried but failed to emulate his success in obtaining donations and support online. Obama raised tens of millions of dollars more over the internet than any of his competitors.

But Obama went far beyond the Howard Dean model of using the internet simply as a means to collect money. "The real Obama story is that he's used the internet as a complete campaign strategy, not just to raise money," says Michael Malbin, executive director of Washington D. C.-based Campaign Finance Institute.

Obama leveraged the so-called Web 2.0 technologies - social networking, user-generated content, blogging, and message boarding - to involve voters in the process like no candidate before him. Case in point: Barack Obama's site has multiple direct links to the MyBarackObama site (http://my.barackobama.com), where users and supporters join to generate content, have discussions, write blog entries, and form communities and friendships. The site gets so much traffic that message postings frequently get thousands of responses each.

Generate that kind of involvement - especially from the younger generation, which is tuned in digitally anyway - and a lot of the other internet-based work gets done for you. Take, for example, will. i. am's by-now legendary Yes We Can song, the Grammy-winning paean to Obama. Not sponsored by Obama, through the power of the internet the song was ultimately viewed by millions of people around the world - over 12 million people on YouTube alone - and for a time became a kind of unofficial Obama theme song.

Obama's effective use of the internet provided the candidate with another advantage over his competitors: an immediate appeal to internet-age users, the youthful generations that have hitherto been so difficult to lure into the political process.

Recent survey data collected by MySpace, the mother of all social networking sites, showed that 60 per cent of all eligible voters who use the site prefer Obama. Obama has had a profile up on MySpace longer than most other candidates. Early Obama supporters generated interest in the candidate through the help of groups utilising the Facebook social networking site.

--- internet's dark side

The 2008 election also reminded everyone involved that the internet can be used as a negative force in campaigns, especially when supporters or interest groups take it upon themselves to spread falsehoods or outright lies about candidates by e-mail. As most e-mail users are now aware, e-mail can be made to look and sound very official, giving it an air of authenticity.

Such has been the case with many e-mail "chain letters" claiming, for instance, that Obama was a Muslim or had links to terrorists. Chain letters like these have been spread widely by groups in an attempt to make voters fearful of what they do not know.

Here, too, however, being able to leverage the power of the internet has worked to Obama's advantage. Obama's staff, recognising the threat it faced from these e-mail campaigns, months ago started a Web site called Stop the Smears (http://stopthesmears.com/), which aimed at debunking false attacks, many spread over the internet itself.

While the Stop the Smears site itself was not among the more heavily visited during the election, the fact that it existed gave traditional reporters a place to go to report "the other side" - and a location that could be linked to around the internet when false rumours were started or spread.

There is little doubt that the success of Obama's campaign in generating both support and money over the internet will be viewed as a model of what must be done to compete effectively in future elections. That will place the internet - and by extension, the people who participate in it - front and centre in elections to come. (dpa)