A week after the Democratic debate, the GOP presidential candidates are beginning to grumble about backing out of their own CNN/YouTube debate scheduled for September. Perhaps they saw how uncomfortable it could be to address heartfelt questions asked by real people from around the country- as close to face-to-face as technology can allow. Or perhaps one candidate’s concern about answering a question from a snowman is the real reason. The GOP would do well to get past their reservations, roll up their sleeves, and dive in, since it’s clear that so many Americans are engaged with social media. Using the latest Web 2.0 technology, campaigns can gain real understanding of the impact of their debate banter and put that to use in campaign messaging and direct outreach with constituents.

As a measurement of public interest in the various questions in the debate, a manual count of YouTube page views is practically useless. The first couple questions have the highest number of views, and then generally dwindle the further down the page you scroll. People generally lost interest fairly quickly. Exceptions are the gimmicky “turn to the person on your left” and “tax song”-type questions. One question which did seem to defy the odds and rise above the rest was Question 34- “Have we had the same two families in charge for too long?” Even at its position at the bottom of the page, this video attracted almost 76,000 views (as of 8/01). This alone should be a warning bell for Senator Clinton, and a bright light toward which all her opponents can flock.

But to create a truly useful metric for what are the most talked-about and contentious issues raised during the recent debate, and how much public impact the debate actually had, we dug a little deeper.

First, we broke down the major issues that bloggers talked about most when discussing the YouTube debate:

Then we took three of those issues, and tracked the total number of blog posts focused entirely or partially on each issue over the past four weeks (we measured only blogs ranked by Collective Intellect for credibility and relevancy):

Post volume about “Global Warming” and “Health Care Reform” increased during the week after the debate. “Education Reform” bounced back a bit from a drop in blog-chatter the previous week. Given that there were no major Global Warming/Health Care events over the week, it can be inferred that the YouTube debate did in fact cause a significant rise in online discussion about the issues. Because of a minor controversy over Barack Obama’s stance on sex education, we can’t say for certain whether talk about “Education Reform” increased because of the debate.

We have developed specific search agents for each frontrunner’s health care plan, and we use a complex algorithm to analyze political blog sentiment. This allows us to look even deeper into a particular issue. In this case, we see that the rise in “health care reform” blog-chatter caused a mostly positive reaction to each of the frontrunners’ plans. This is especially good for the candidates, because in this case we have included both left and right-leaning blogs into the data:

If they allow themselves the opportunity, campaigns can pull precise, actionable data from online political communities. This ability only increases each time a political event uses the Web directly. Candidates on both sides of the aisle may want to rethink their positions on snowmen.