A couple days ago I attended a panel hosted by Politico.com and Waggener Edstrom, which examined the role of new media in the 2008 election campaigns. The panel was moderated by Jim VandeHei and Ben Smith from Politico, and consisted of the online communications directors from the Giuliani, Dodd, Romney, Thompson, and Biden campaigns.

They broadly discussed the role of new media in helping drive traffic to campaign Web sites; increase donations, find new constituents, etc. (all things you can do with Issues Wire as well – sorry for the shameless plug) but it was fascinating to hear the varying strategic angles that the online campaigns took.

Mindy Finn from the Romney campaign, who I found to be particularly engaging and shrewd, discussed the importance of tailoring the online campaign to the strengths of the particular candidate. For instance, her campaign focused on video because of Romney’s natural charisma and physical presence. She also showcased the Five Brothers blog, which apparently is collaboratively authored by Romney’s five sons who are all campaigning on his behalf. Finn also discussed the importance of using social media as part of a broader integrated strategy that encompasses direct mail and e-mail to drive people to visit the Web site where they can participate in more interactive experiences, including an invitation to have users create their own ads.

I couldn’t help but wonder about the growing potential for politicians to begin using user-generated content as a resource for mudslinging at this point.

At any rate, Jon Henke from Fred ’08 spoke to the changing paradigm of media (consumption and production?) and agreed with Finn that a strategy needs to be integrated, and spoke to the growing ubiquity of new media across various departments – not just the communications department.

Eric Carbone, who may have been the most veteran member of the panel after serving as online communications director for Clark in ’04, shared his insights as to what has changed in the past four years – the growing accessibility and potential of video, the increasing prominence of social networking and the rise in user-generated media. As he showcased a user-produced video, YouTube began stuttering which I interpreted as if the God of the Internet was saying, “Not quite yet…”

As Carbone talked about the various channels where the campaigns interact with audiences, I had a sudden thought that in social media we no longer can talk about ‘distribution channels,’ but are actually talking about something new – ‘engagement channels’. Can I trademark that?

Macon Phillips from Blue State Digital, also a member of the DC chapter of Social Media Club, made some very compelling points about the importance of social networking solutions tailored towards political campaigns. Strangely, Macon was left off the PR Newswire release that went out for some reason.

The overall feeling I got was that in ’08 the role of online has taken a substantial leap forward and the campaigns have become far more sophisticated in their application of interactive technologies. Of course, the proof is in the pudding – as several pointed out during the panel, Dean was probably more advanced than any of the democratic candidates during ’04 and ultimately the competitive advantage wasn’t sufficient to push him past Kerry.

There is an inherent risk in placing too much focus on the new media components of the campaign strategy because at the end of the day, it is the candidate’s presence and offline activities that will largely determine the relative success of their campaign.