Netroots Nation: Recap of Thursday

It's 3:30 here in Austin and I have already packed in a bunch of activities.

First, I attended the DNC & Obama for America: The Tools - Online Tools for Social Networking with Chris Hughes and Judith Freeman of the Obama campaign.

This panel was essentially about Obama for America's social networking strategy. Chris did most of the talking and did a very impressive job. This guy knows his stuff. The majority of the time was spent on the my.barackobama.com social network. Chris talked about how the purpose of myBO is to enable everyday people to bring about change as easily as possible.

He talked about how the campaign focused more on function than form. MyBO may not be the flashiest and best technology around, but it is designed to be as useful as possible. However, Chris says that they are working on improving the user interface of the site.

The core of myBO is about communities and the campaign's ability to pay attention to the community of supporters and to get them to use the tools in their own communities.

They spent some time talking about the new platform house party program, and how it is loosely structured to enable people to make their own events as relevant as possible to their communities. A couple of interesting things about the platform program: they created a really great host guide that makes organizing an event much less intimidating and they have staff follow up with party hosts throughout the process.

They talked about how myBO fits in to the Obama field program. People that were interested in helping did not have to wait for official campaign staff to come to their area in order to help the campaign. They made sure that there were a lot of things for people to do on the site no matter what their interests and preferences are.

There are three main ways that they organize on Facebook.

1. Campaign page: 1,150,000 supporters. They use it as a communications medium and do a lot with video. They use the page's update functionality to message their members.
2. Using local groups religiously. Everyone in field organization was told that they needed to create a Facebook group locally. If a lot of people join a group in a local network it makes it more likely to show up in people's feeds. This allows the size of the group to increase and then you have a direct line of communication to those people. There are significant ripple effects if you do it locally. One person in campaign headquarters can't create all the groups, it is something that must be done locally.
3. Creating a Facebook application. An effective way for people who are supporters to keep up what they are doing and share that information with their friends.

MySpace. Chris calls it a phenomenally important communications tool. The pages are much more customizable and they can encourage people to embed their own logos or widgets. They have incredible flexibility. Emphasize lowering the bar to make it easy as possible with many options to get them to put stuff on their page, which results in lots of distribution very quickly. At the end of the day they want people to get engaged in other campaign activities. They are trying to incorporate all of this energy and interest into the campaign programatically while at the same time getting as much distribution as possible.

The calling tool on myBo is something that is very effective and it enables people to make phone calls from the campaign that could or would not go to a campaign headquarters to do it. It is especially effective for the elderly and people living in rural areas.

During the question period Chris was asked about peer-to-peer from someone from PIRG's New Voters Project. Chris says that the campaign has reached the same conclusions that the research has: peer-to-peer contact is extremely effective in reaching young voters.

Rob Dolin sent me a tweet during the panel asking why the campaign chose to create their own social network instead of just using existing ones. This is the answer: most of the users of the myBO functionality tend to be older than those people that already are active in current social networks. It enables everyone that is interested to participate with a full campaign functionality that is not available within current social networks. It also removed the difficulty of data integration.

Dean's Registration Kick-Off Rally

Next was the rally with Governor Dean kicking of the DNC's new voter registration program. Over 100 people were outside in the heat and were definitely excited. Dean actually talked a bit about young voters and their importance, and a young College Democrat spoke earlier as well.

Youth Caucus

We just finished up the youth caucus. We had good attendance and a very engaged discussion that did not want to end when our time was up. A lot of topics were discussed, including coordinated leadership pipelines, what is the youth movement, what are the important themes for young people, and a lot of discussion on young people that never went to college and how to reach them.

Jim Slattery, US Senate candidate from Kansas, dropped by and talked about youth issues. It's great to see candidates really putting the effort in to make young voters an important aspect of their campaigns.

Now I am sitting in the hotel lobby writing this post. I think I will be going to the OpenLeft Caucus at 4:30 and then the Readers and Writers mixer, followed by the Howard Dean keynote.

Funny thing just happened. A couple of guys were walking by in the hotel that weren't associated with Netroots Nation, and one says to the other: "there are a lot of people in this hotel using laptops, huh." I bet this lobby looks really strange to people that don't realize that there is a blogger conference going on.

I'll have more later.