King for a day
When satirical newsman Stephen Colbert announced his candidacy for president earlier this month, the publicity stunt temporarily vaulted him past both parties’ front-runners in terms of popularity on the blogosphere.
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William Beutler, who tracks these things at the political affairs practice of New Media Strategies, tells us that after Colbert announced Oct. 16, he was mentioned on 0.09 percent of all blog posts (not just political blogs). Hillary Clinton had the same level of mentions during the same period, and Rudy Giuliani was mentioned on 0.08 percent of blogs.
In terms of raw numbers, Beutler said, “In the three-day period surrounding his announcement (day of, morning after, and one more day) 748 different blog posts mentioned the phrases ‘Stephen Colbert’ and ‘president.’ If you run the same search for ‘Hillary Clinton’ without ‘president’ – since we assume any post about her is also about her candidacy we get 727 posts. [So] even though our search string for Hillary was less stringent he actually scored more mentions than she did.”
Beutler said Colbert “had a larger spike in mentions of his name than any other candidate” when they announced, except Clinton and Barack Obama.
Why such a big bump?
“Blogs are attracted to shiny objects, and Colbert is nothing if not a shiny object,” Beutler said. “Even serious-minded bloggers can’t resist.”
