As the 2012 cycle begins to warm up a bit, I hope candidates and their campaigns carefully study what worked and what didn’t last cycle.

This video, from the firm Targeted Victory, offers a quick-moving lesson on how the Marco Rubio campaign used the Internet – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, special online fund-raising days, Facebook town halls – in his once-long-shot campaign for Senate in Florida this year.

The end result was a campaign that punched well above its weight in the online world. In a three-way race, Rubio accounted for 72 percent of all Facebook “likes”, 58 percent of all Twitter followers, 85 percent of all YouTube views, 55 percent of all web visits to candidate web sites, and 48.9 percent of the final vote. One in three of his e-mail subscribers were donors.