In this week’s Mass High Tech, Denise DeMurcie writes a column based on an interview with me, in which she points out the differences among the major presidential candidates when it comes to web video.  The bottom line: Barack Obama is way out front in using modern web video tools, John McCain is lagging well behind, and Hillary Clinton is somewhere in the middle.

Denise’s interview with me is published as a podcast on her website, and goes into far more detail than any of my blog posts about why and how we created the internet TV channel for the Mitt Romney for President campaign.  Mitt TV is widely knowledged as the first comprehensive video channel for a presidential campaign.

Both the Romney and Obama campaigns understood the power of video not only to get the message out but also to attract, engage, and actuate supporters on the main campaign website.  Without disclosing specific numbers, we found that when we could use web video to bring a viewer to the campaign website and call them to action, the payoff — in terms of contributions, volunteer sign-ups, referrals, event attendance, etc. — was orders of magnitude more than the cost of serving up the video.  That’s why we favored video on our own website over the many clips we posted on YouTube.  And that’s why by the end of the Romney campaign we had more than 400 video clips online and literally thousands of in-links to Mitt TV.

The campaigns have been waking up to this potential slowly, and some of them have been tuning in even more slowly to the modern tools of internet TV channel design and implementation.  By the 2012 campaign cycle, this will all seem like old hat…but for now, the candidates are definitely on different tracks and most certainly achieving different results.  It may be pure coincidence that the candidates’ fundraising performance correlates with their sophistication on internet video, but our experience suggests that sophisticated use of web video certainly has an impact on keeping an active, vibrant base of supporters who visit often and want to stay involved.