The main reason people were attracted to Paul, according to Lam, was because his message was so radically different from the rest of the Republican field. Early on, the campaign decided to take the opposite route from Obama in organizing online support. Where Obama turned his site into an organized, central social network, Paul's campaign used their site as a hub for pointing to various activities organized by the grassroots.

Though the campaign didn't manage it, the burgeoning grassroots support network responded to the call to organize themselves and famously began to overwhelm social media and news sites like YouTube and Digg with Ron Paul items. Seeing the fervor that was building among their core supporters, the campaign decided to see if they could harness it for fundraising purposes.

Last August, they held a contest to see which Paul Meetup group could raise the most money. Though the campaign raised $500,000, smaller groups complained that it was unfair -- they could never compete. So the Paul campaign changed its tack and asked supporters to try to meet certain fundraising goals. They used classic methods of motivation: putting people's names on screen, using a thermometer graphic to measure growth, and play to the crowd mentality.

The rub is that Paul's success -- at least financially -- is owed less to some magical new use of the Internet, but rather tapping into a support network that grew up organically around the campaign by using traditional motivational psychology. By setting specific goals, they were able to narrow the attention of supporters and direct people toward a set activity. According to Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, people have a specific need for achievement, respect, and the realization of their full potential. Playing off those needs, the Paul campaign was able to motivate people toward specific goals and keep energy among core supporters high.

This, of course, is not unique in politics. Every campaign utilized the same basic tactics. The difference was that Paul relied more heavily on letting the community organize the effort. This perhaps led to what social psychologist Gustave Le Bon would call "group mind," in which the crowd exerts influence over its members. Or in other words, the crowd acts on its own. That actually might have helped the Paul campaign reach its goals because it energized the grassroots to act as a single group with a uniform goal.

It also had drawbacks, however. Similar to how web sites that rely on user generated content cede a lot of power to users, Paul's network of grassroots supporters had a perhaps undue amount of power over the campaign. As Lam noted, for example, one of the things the grassroots network dreamed up was raising money for a blimp. The Paul campaign would have preferred to use the money on TV and radio advertisements, but the blimp idea caught on with supporters and they couldn't stop it (and dared not try).

In the end, Paul's success came down to two things: the emergence of a grassroots support network, presumably because of the uniqueness of his message compared with those of his opponents, and the use of basic motivational psychology techniques to encourage that grassroots network to organize itself. While Internet tools certainly helped to make that organization happen more easily and allowed message delivery to happen more quickly, I'm not sure they prompted anything very radical in terms of how the campaign was managed.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Image via Steak Rules.

On the Democratic side, the web looks to have been a little better at predicting the results of the election. Obama, who was far and away the most popular Democratic candidate on the Internet, captured 37% of his party's state delegates, easily beating Edwards and Clinton. So why is it that the web was so reliable at predicting the winner on the Democratic side, but so out of touch with the Republican side? We can piece together the answer from exit polling and other data by figuring out just why each candidate won.

Why Obama Won

We'll tackle Obama first. According to exit polls, most of Obama's support came from the 17-44 age group, which made up 30% of Democratic caucus goers. In the 17-24 age bracket, which made up 17% of the total turnout, Obama won 57% of the vote. It's clear that Obama resonated with young voters in Iowa -- precisely the type of people who would be most likely to follow politics via the Internet. What's more, he (and the Democratic party) were able to motivate young voters to caucus.

Obama also won a plurality of independent and first-time caucus goers. Clearly, the Internet helped Obama a great deal. He was able to mobilize young voters online and actually translate that support into results at the polls. Further, as we noted earlier this year, Obama's online popularity has helped him out-fundraise his rivals.

But Obama also used that money to far outspend other Democrats in Iowa. He reportedly spent $9 million to run nearly 11,000 television ad spots in Iowa -- nearly $2 million more than Hillary Clinton. Obama also made 186 campaign stops in Iowa since July 1, 2007 -- not the most among Democrats, but still indicative of a strong campaign in the state.

The data suggests that though the Internet clearly helped Obama by rallying support among young voters who actually turned up to vote, it was likely traditional offline campaigning that won the state for the Illinois Senator.

Why Huckabee Won

Huckabee's numbers are more curious. He was outspent in Iowa (Mitt Romney -- who finished second -- spent $7 million on TV ads to Huckabee's $1.4 million), and though Huckabee saw a surge of Internet support in the past couple of months, the exit polling showed that young voters made up only a small fraction on the Republican side, where the large majority of caucus participants were over the age of 45.

The exit polls do point to a reason for Huckabee's run away victory, though: 60% of Republican voters identified themselves as "born-again or evangelical Christians," and 46% of those voted for Huckabee. Huckabee, who is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, is generally seen as a champion of the Christian right.

It seems likely, then, that Huckabee owes his Iowa victory to a grassroots support movement among evangelical Christians -- one that likely did not take place on social networking sites and YouTube, but rather in Churches and at small town hall meetings. Huckabee did make 120 visits to the state, the second most of any Republican candidate.

Why Ron Paul Didn't Win

The same exit poll numbers that attribute Huckabee's win to a strong evangelical Christian showing, also demonstrate a poor youth turnout that likely hurt Ron Paul. Most of Paul's votes came from the 17-29 year old crowd, but that only accounted for 11% of the total caucus participants on the Republican side. Where Obama was helped by a strong youth turnout (the 17-29 age group made up 22% of Democratic voters), Paul was hurt by a weak youth turnout for the Republican caucus. It is interesting to note, as well, that Huckabee still crushed Paul in that age group, taking 40% of the under 30 vote, to Paul's 21%.

Paul may also have been hurt by not running a very strong traditional campaign in Iowa. By mid-December, Paul had only bought radio time in Iowa, while his competition was spending up a storm to the tune of 8,500 TV spots for Romney and 1,800 spots for Huckabee. Paul also visited Iowa the least of the top 6 Republican candidates -- only 37 times since July 1. Compared to 144 visits from Romney and 120 visits from Huckabee, Paul was a relative ghost in Iowa.

This could indicate that Paul conceded Iowa to the front-runners and plans to spend his massive war chest elsewhere (perhaps, as many have speculated, to run as an Independent -- note: I am not well versed in campaign finance law, so I am not totally sure if it is legally plausible to spend money donated for a party primary run on a general election as an Independent). Or it could indicate what many of us have suspected, that the Internet can make a vocal minority appear to have much more momentum than they actually do.

The grassroots movement that has sprung up around Paul is spearheaded by a very web-savvy bunch. They have organized around tools like email, message boards, Google News, and Technorati, such that if something is blogged about Ron Paul, or submitted to Digg, or Reddit, they descend on it and make sure their collective voice is heard. But I think poll results -- and I suspect election results as well -- will continue to indicate that Paul's vocal online minority is still just that: a minority.

And as for beating Giuliani? As I mentioned, the traditional polls predicted it would happen, and it's really not a surprise considering Giuliani abandoned Iowa and New Hampshire weeks ago to focus his attention on later primary states, such as Florida (which votes on January 29) or those that vote on so-called Super Tuesday (February 5). Still, 10% of the vote is better than he was polling and is impressive. I don't think it will be enough to carry him to the nomination, but the Internet did make Ron Paul relevant enough to get the mainstream media talking about him, which likely helped him gain some supporters.

I think the most interesting scenario for the future is an Independent run by Ron Paul (let's face it, he's not going to win the Republican nomination, and his politics line up more with the Libertarian party anyway -- whom he represented in the 1988 presidential election). Ron Paul might still not have a realistic shot at winning the general election as an Independent, but with his fundraising prowess, he could make sure he was heard and might draw enough votes away from the major party nominees to have a real impact on the results.

"Paul and his zealous online supporters offer a case study on how, by leveraging Meetup.com, online activism can be harnessed into offline action," writes Compete's Matt Pace, pointing to the 82,000 Meetup members in Paul's camp who have held nearly 21,000 offline meetings. But how much of that is planned or even officially sanctioned by the Paul campaign?

The second largest Paul group on Meetup, the "Greater NYC Ron Paul Action Group Manhattan+," has a link to the NY4Paul.com site, which is unaffiliated with the Ron Paul campaign. In 2004, when Howard Dean became the poster boy for netroots politics by utilizing the same site (Meetup), it was mainly an accident. The New York Times wrote recently, "Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met." The same thing seems to be happening with Ron Paul now.

Of course, that is the very definition of grassroots. But what it points to is this: these things can't be planned. Ron Paul's grassroots support network grew up by itself, not likely because Paul himself planned it. When Paul raised $4 million on Guy Fawkes Day, it was via a fundraising effort that his campaign had nothing to do with. So, Meetup is less of a secret campaign weapon than is a zealous grassroots support group (the former only works if you already have the latter), but that sort of thing is impossible to plan.

The Compete numbers do tell us a couple of other things, though. According to TechPresident, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still have by far the most Facebook and MySpace supporters, but the FaceTime stats suggest that perhaps Ron Paul is engaging his supporters via the Internet better than his opponents. What the metric doesn't tell us is how many people are watching Paul, just how much they're watching. TechPresident points out that Paul's recent record $6 million single day fundraising haul was made possible by contributions of just 58,000 people (or about .0001933% of the country) -- so it certainly possible that he is engaging his supporters more than his opponents, but that the total number of supporters still numbers far fewer.

That could be why Paul's incredible online support has so far not translated into success in traditional polls of likely voters, where he generally does not make much of an impression (Paul averages just 5% across national Republican polls).

In August, we wondered why there was such a disconnect between online popularity and poll numbers in a post called The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics?. We suggested three reasons, including demographics, "cool factor," and that the traditional polling methods themselves were screwed up. But I think perhaps the best possible cause of the disconnect came from one of our commenters.

"There's a possible fourth reason for the disconnect - the internet is international. US politics has worldwide implications and so non-US citizens and even non-US residents care about the US election, watch candidate videos on YouTube and befriend them on social networks. However, they don't vote," wrote Elad.

Outside of the US, where anti-war sentiment is often much stronger, it seems likely that onlookers would be attracted to the more staunchly anti-war candidates (like Paul on the Republican side, and Obama or Kucinich on the Democratic side). Further, Paul and Obama are also likely seen as the most anti-establishment candidates (due to Paul's Libertarian views, which contrast sharply with those of his fellow Republicans, and the perception that Obama is a Washington outsider because of the short time he has been in the Senate). I wonder how many of Paul's 5.8 million YouTube views come from outside the US?