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The Bowles campaign got serious online because Erskine Bowles, a BlackBerry-toting policy wonk, wanted it that way. "I believe the Internet can connect people to the political process in a completely new and exciting way," the candidate said in July, and he took a personal interest in making it happen. Yet, even as Bowles was urging his campaign staff to pursue an active Web strategy, a certain amount of inertia on the part of the old-school political operatives he employed had to be overcome. Clearly the Bowles team could have run a more timely and effective online campaign.

Communications Director Susan Lagana and Campaign Manager Guy Cecil did not move quickly to adopt an up-to-date Internet strategy. Months passed after Bowles first expressed his interest in an aggressive online campaign to Lagana—in late 2003—before a serious Web strategy was finally defined at his Raleigh headquarters. Mathew Gross, the campaign's Internet strategist, first interviewed with the campaign in April of 2004, and he wasn't hired until June.

The late start hurt the online campaign. "You need time to build a community," Gross says. "There are a limited number of techniques to spur growth in readership and response, and time is one of the things that you know can help you do that." But once the Web campaign got rolling, it got results in a hurry. The first thing Gross did was send out a fund-raising e-mail to addresses Bowles had gathered during his previous campaign, and over the preceding months. It worked. In the last three days of the second quarter, Bowles raised as much cash online as he had in the previous 87 days, for a total of about $70,000. "Just asking is an important first step," says Gross, who joined the Dean campaign last March, and whose previous gigs include environmental activist and drummer for an indie-rock band.

The campaign Weblog launched in July, just three months before the election. It gave the Bowles brain trust its own media outlet for text, audio and video, which allowed the campaign to publish material on its own schedule. Bowles no longer had to rely solely on ads and wait for coverage from local papers and television outlets, which often pay only sporadic attention to most elections. The blog helped publicize a summer bus tour that Bowles made across the state, generating some early momentum and buzz. But then the blog lost steam. "Once the excitement of the bus tour faded, attention to the blog was less intense," says Gross. "The campaign never identified that one blog contributor who was passionate about it, a writer who thought this was the cat's meow, someone who would come in early or stay late to write online—and you need that kind of focus, because a blog is ultimately a human voice."

Online fund-raising was important to the Bowles campaign, which started the year with barely one-third of the $5.9 million raised by Burr as of January 1, 2004.

In the third quarter (ended September 30), Bowles had raised over $210,000 online, much of that coming from small donors who gave an average of just over $100 each. The end-of-quarter push was promoted breathlessly on the campaign blog, which ran images of a big red balloon expanding as more money came in, and via e-mail requests for funds. Ultimately, Bowles raised more than $9 million for the campaign, as opposed to Burr's $11 million.

Over time, the main campaign Web page grew more blog-like. Rather than posting a static page, the Bowles team gave the site frequent updates and provided links to campaign ads and volunteer information. The entire Web presence was shifted to a popular Weblog software package called Movable Type, from San Mateo, Ca.-based vendor Six Apart Ltd., which allowed any user with a password to update the page. "That removed one of the key bottlenecks of a flat HTML page, where you have to wait for an administrator to change something," says Gross.

A variety of in-depth information was made available online—"the campaign beneath the sound bites," Gross calls it. There were online communities that allowed supporters to connect with people with similar interests, such as Entrepreneurs for Bowles, Veterans for Bowles and so on; issue-oriented pages with detailed plans for jobs, healthcare, and other hot topics; and a site called "The Truth About Burr" that was dedicated to trashing the opponent for his alleged close ties to special interests.

Burr's home page, too, was getting bloggier, with links to his TV ads and more frequent news updates. The Republican even launched a site called Blog 4 Burr, aimed at college students, although it drew limited traffic and almost no comments. But Burr's campaign was not focused on creating a breakthrough Web presence. The strength of their Web effort, said Burr campaign spokesman Doug Heye, was an e-mail list of over 100,000 names, which allowed the candidate to contact supporters easily.

E-mail was important to the Bowles campaign as well. It may not be glamorous, but it is a vital component of an integrated Web strategy, a critical way of communicating with supporters and tying other elements of the campaign together. "You get people involved, you make them feel that they are part of the campaign, by asking them to forward an e-mail," says Gross. Buying names is not an effective way to build an e-mail list, he adds, noting that organic growth more than doubled the campaign's e-mail roster in the months after he came on board. "An e-mail from the campaign announcing a new ad leads to a spike in traffic at the Web site," he says. E-mail was also important in targeting the volunteers to reach out to undecided voters whom campaign manager Cecil identified as a key to the race, and in getting volunteers to perform tasks like working phones and polls.

Bowles also made use of Web advertising, including ads that ran on local and national political Weblogs. Here, the senate campaign was well ahead of the presidential contenders. A study by the Pew Research Center, an independent media research group, showed that Bush and Kerry spent about 100 times more on television ads than they did on Web advertising, and that the Web advertising they did use tended to be old-school banner ads. Bowles used banner ads at three high-traffic North Carolina news Web sites during the last week of the campaign, but mostly relied on keyword driven Google ads, along with spots placed on Weblogs from the innovative Chapel Hill firm BlogAds. "The banner ads cost as much as three dollars per thousand impressions," says BlogAds founder Henry Copeland. "Our customers are spending more like 50 cents per thousand, and reaching a more interested audience."

Gross says the blog ads worked. "We were able to respond quickly online when the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced plans to pour millions of dollars into Burr's campaign," says Gross. A series of ads on political Weblogs, warning that the national organization was trying to "buy North Carolina," paid for itself quickly with the money it raised.

By October, attack ads for the two candidates were running one after another on television. The Bowles blog began its barrage of detailed attacks on Burr's record as a congressman. In the final week of the race, the blog, and blog advertising, reverted to presenting a positive image of Bowles amid the negative posts. A key to the North Carolina strategy, says Gross, was understanding the market. He didn't use tools like the Meetup event-planning service or software that organized local house parties, because the county organizations were already local. "There are times when it makes more sense to use the phone," he says. "You've got to recognize that it's not about the Web, it's about integrating the Web into an overall campaign organization."

On election night, Gross considered the role of the online strategy in the unsuccessful Bowles campaign. "What we did worked well," he said. "On a day when Bush won the way he did here, I don't know if anything we did online would have made a difference."

Blog the vote
More than a dozen candidates for the U.S.Senate, most of them Democrats, used Weblogs in the 2004 campaign. Here's a rundown of how they fared, online and at the polls.
CANDIDATE	PARTY	STATE	REMARKS	RESULTS
ERSKINE BOWLES	D	NC	Candidate's personal interest led to online strategy	LOST
BRAD CARSON	D	OK	Refused to drop links to controversial sites	LOST
BETTY CASTOR	D	FL	Most comprehensive online strategy in nation	LOST
TOM DASCHLE	D	SD	Frequent posts and lots of info at minority leader 's site	LOST
JOE HOEFFEL	D	PA	Ambitious $1 million online fund-raising goal	LOST
CHRIS JOHN	D	LA	Impersonal but newsy page	LOST
TIM MICHELS	R	WI	Blunt talk on differences with opponent	LOST
BARBARA MIKULSKI	D	MD	Longtime incumbent barely used blog	WON
PATTY MURRAY	D	WA	Loads of news clippings	WON
GEORGE NETHERCUTT	R	WA	Similar to rival Murray,a well-maintained clip service	LOST
BARACK OBAMA	D	IL	Online strength may help him beyond the Senate	WON
INEZ TENENBAUM	D	SC	Infrequent posts petered out altogether late in race	LOST

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