How Republicans won the Internet

The Washington Post reports:

Scott Brown's supporters became fans of the candidate on Facebook, where they commented on his status updates and uploaded their own photos. The Republican Senate hopeful took to Twitter, using the #masen hashtag to let his followers know how the race was going. His campaign powered its field operation through targeted online ads and Web-based spreadsheets, and raised $12 million from 157,000 individual donations in the last two weeks of the race. After he won last week, his team live-streamed the election-night party in Boston online.

Democratic candidates don't have a monopoly on online organizing anymore. Brown and his campaign staffers deserve the credit for proving this, but it's a reason to celebrate for us and our new-media colleagues, too -- we've been working to get the GOP into the Web era for the past decade. We've been laughed out of high-level campaign meetings, told that online budgets are the first thing to go and informed that having a Facebook page is "unpresidential." And it wasn't until recently that people stopped asking us to fix their computers.

But we've always had faith that the rightroots could organize for victory, as the netroots had on the left. It just needed some nurturing. And now that it's launched Sen.-elect Brown in Massachusetts, the online-organizing playing field is more even than it's ever been in the past 10 years of American politics.