Iowa voters spoke loudly this week in the Democratic and Republican caucuses. And depending on the campaign, the roster of candidates in both parties is recalibrating itself as things roll on towards New Hampshire and beyond. Republican winner and upstart Mike Huckabee heads to the Granite State with clear momentum from his 8 point victory in Iowa, as does his Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney are left sorting through the debris of millions in Hawkeye advertising expenditures and little real return for the investment.

What does any of this mean from an online marketing standpoint? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Candidates are surely spending loads of cash on display advertising and socking away tens of millions of monthly impressions. At the same time, they’re investing in website development that’s allowing online visitors to view candidate videos, make instant campaign donations, sign-up for local volunteer efforts and meetings, and otherwise jumpstart viral campaigns that run less on money and more on word of mouth. In a phrase, the 08 online campaign season is shaping up to be consistently unpredictable.

Overall, there are two important lessons to be learned.

Lesson One: A wave of political advertisements, paid and otherwise, are flooding the ether.
Alright, an obvious point, but one worth elaborating on. While we’re only into the first week of January, early returns are pointing to an online ad binge unprecedented in scope, even when measured against the short history of online political campaigns. A recent analysis from PQ Media predicts a huge 84 percent surge in online ad spends over the 06 election cycle. In real numbers, candidates served up over 277 million display ad impressions in 07’ alone. Interestingly, two Republican Presidential hopefuls – John McCain and the aforementioned Romney – accounted for 70 percent of these impressions. Obama claimed most of the rest, while Huckabee and Clinton combined for nary a percent.

These ads are playing multi-purpose roles for candidates. Some are redirecting to donation forms with the candidate domain. Others are linking to volunteer sign-up pages. Still others are landing users on candidate media pages, where campaign enthusiasts can view speeches and listen to radio ads from their candidate, and then conveniently pass them along to friends and family who may or may not be affiliated with the candidate or his/her position on a certain issue.

Of course, the Web has given new meaning to the term “viral,” making the proliferation of candidate media – broadcast quality and otherwise – affordable and available for all, and accessible on demand. A single YouTube post can spread like wildfire and change the political landscape; all for the price (in minutes) it takes to upload a 1MB file.

A notable example of this is Huckabee’s now famous YouTube video with Chuck Norris of Walker Texas Ranger and martial arts fame. The video features the candidate laying out three of his policy positions with the humorous assistance of Norris. Since its posting in November, the video has been viewed in various forms over three million times, creating residual awareness that no doubt coincides with Huckabee’s ascension to the top of the Republican pile over the past 8 weeks. Valuable awareness for very little money.

Lesson 2: There is no clear correlation this cycle between online donations, activism and votes.

Greenbacks and volunteers are the mother’s milk of politics. Without them, campaigns wither, and candidates fade into oblivion. Such is the conventional wisdom, anyway.

Unconventional candidates often turn it on its head, though, and this cycle is no exception. Witness the campaign of Congressman Ron Paul, who has the highest trafficked candidate site among Republicans (43 percent market share), and commands an $18m war chest, third most among his Republican brethren. Donation reports show most of Paul’s haul over the last year originating via individual web contributions averaging $100 per. On November 5, he brought in an astounding $4.2m in online donations. Paul even has 67,000 Meetup.com followers, 20 times more than his nearest competitor, Barack Obama.

And, yet, Paul finished a distant fifth in Iowa this week. While he’s doing well in New Hampshire polls, we suspect that his legion of followers are – however Internet savvy and generous with their time and money – finite in number. How else can someone with so much apparent enthusiasm among the politically astute public and so flush with cash be stuck near the bottom of his party’s also-ran candidates? Simple: while the Internet has made it easier to communicate with fellow campaign enthusiasts and give money to favorite candidates, these two do not necessarily translate into votes on cold election nights in Iowa. It takes more than a vocal and tech savvy minority to win at the ballot box.