Some political Internet “experts” think that the Internet is the end-all be-all of campaigns, but it’s only one part. Successful campaigns aren’t built around the Web alone. They are built around strategies that use a wide variety of tools and tactics including television, direct mail and the Internet.

Recently, a study was released by the Pew Research Center. The news, as it was cribbed from the study by the mainstream media and blogs, was that the entire nation was moving over to the Internet to get its news. According to the report, about 61 percent of Americans get at least some of their news from the Internet.

Hearing news like that might make some campaign consultants concentrate on the Web as a strategy on the level of a get-out-the-vote-effort. That would be a mistake.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says in the video, it’s all about extending the story. The Internet is not an end in itself. For every television advertisement, for every radio advertisement, for every direct mail piece, use that medium for exactly what it is supposed to do. But don’t stop there. That doesn’t mean just linking the website. It means extending the story with an extremely strong strong appeal to visit the website. Just think about the GoDaddy commercials. Then you can et people to engage with the candidate via Facebook, Twitter and whichever other social media in which the campaign is engaged.

In this way, you can connect the voters on multiple platforms. Something left out of many of the stories about the Pew research is that only two percent of Americans get all of their information from the Internet. Therefore, having an Internet operation running in a vacuum will not help.

Another statistic from the study is that 92 percent of people in this country get their news from multiple platforms. To repeat a modern political cliché, you have to go to where the voters are. They aren’t all on the Internet, or going to the Internet first. But the people who are most likely to vote and most likely to contribute will end up on the Web. That’s why it’s very important that if you want to win, you have to combine traditional and online marketing strategies.