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My.BarackObama.com - Review

No, this isn't one of my campaign website reviews . I'd love to write one about Barack's site, but I don't have time at the moment.

So instead, I point you to this review, which also offers some general advice to campaigns looking to become involved in social networking:

With all social networks or communities, the ultimate question to be answered is "What goal is the technology helping achieve?" In the case of Obama's network, it really isn't clear what purpose the network serves. Sure, I can log in and find other people, or blog, look up an event, but isn't that much easier on a site like Facebook, where the Obama group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) already has 250,000 members? Ironically, Obama himself doesn't even belong to this group (Note to the Obama web people, wake up and embrace the social media). By attempting to create a social network to solve a need that other social networks have solved, is Obama just reinventing the wheel?

In the 2008 election cycles, different networks will serve different purposes. Facebook, Myspace and the other premier social networks will undoubtedly serve as connection vectors for followers of political candidates. Why? Network effect. There are always going to be more people on Myspace or Facebook than on Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Sam Brownback's social network. As such, it is absolutely important for campaigns to realize that they'll always be competing with (and losing to) these social networks. So what good does a private label network provide?

The answer lies in answering situationally relevant information needs of individuals in a simple, low-involvement fashion. The candidate's social network should serve as the nexus of information about the candidate. It should be the place that I can go to to find anything and everything about the candidate, information about events, snippets and facts I can blog about, heavy integration of social media such as Flickr or Youtube so I can experience everything about the candidate in a single place. It should not try to act as the sole vector between the candidate's supporters. In fact, doing so could be significantly harmful, as it might give supporters the impression that this private-label group is the only netgroup that supports the candidate, obviously leaving aside the millions that support the candidate in other groups.

I think the author gives too much credence to the idea that campaign social networks will never compete with existing networks like MySpace and FaceBook. Of course he's right - they never will - but that's not really the point. The point is that there is a segment of voters who will be hungry for more intimate involvement with the campaign than can be provided by a FaceBook group. Candidate created social networks allow for that involvement. They can be more focused channels of social network energy.

If you want to know what the results of that are - look no further than the grassroots base of the Dean campaign and the corresponding financial muscle they lent to his candidacy. Obviously the next step in this election is to actually turn that energy into votes. Also, the no-brainer here is that in-house social networks appeal to a lot of folks who don't know what FaceBook is or think that MySpace is occupied only by 15 year olds and sexual deviants.

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February 12th, 2007 11:14am
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not sure if any campaigns are doing this

Submitted by Jake Thorn on Tue, 2007-02-13 00:54.

but it might be possible to use social networks to raise ground-up organizing by putting volunteers in direct contact with each other with the express purpose of getting them to self-organize. simple fundraisers, events, lte campaigns, etc,…without needing upper management involvement. all they’d need is the funds. it’d be like having 1000 local campaigns instead of 1 national one…the national group’s only job would be to provide information, talking points, technical help and funding.

isn’t that kind of what the Dean folks did with meetup.com? it seems to me that the new tools could make that stuff seem crude and weak by comparison. I doubt there’ll be anything too impressive this cycle, though.

also, Facebook groups are less attractive now that the “Message All Members” feature is disabled after 1000 people join, so you can’t organize via Facebook anymore unless you get creative and use the new Create Group Event feature, which is gutsy, because you risk losing membership everytime you bother the herd (if I was an underdog, I’d go for it, though…just for the Newsfeed exposure). the “group info” and “recent news” sections are as indispensable as ever, since that’s the first thing anyone who wanders into a group will see… and we all know first impressions are huge. great place to post info about lowering tuition, raising student aid, cutting loan interest, universal healthcare, Iraq, other bread and butter issues that we follow and/or affect us.

broadly speaking, the Facebook group is absolutely necessary, just for the convenience factor. your average student is far more likely to click a link in somebody’s Facebook profile to a candidate group than to Google them.

some of this is happening

Submitted by Michael Connery on Tue, 2007-02-13 06:17.

Some of this is happening, and if the campaign is smart, they will hire the folks who run those facebook groups and put them on the task of doing exactly what you are saying.

That is essentially what happened with the original Dean Meetups. It became more hierarchical as the campaign progressed and they tried to channel that energy into distinct, national actions.

I don’t think that using the “Create New Group Event” feature is as onerous/dangerous to the health of a group as you suggest. At worst it will weed out extremely soft support. It may not make for great looking numbers (1 Million for Barack!), but it makes a stronger program that is more reliably measured.

1000

Submitted by Josh Koenig on Wed, 2007-02-14 09:27.

Your notion of 1000 local campaigns is exactly right on the network model. There are legal and organizational issues with having a strong connection (let alone providing funds) from HQ to these kinds of groups — we dealt with this constantly on the Dean campaign — but with the right campaign methods I think it can work. They key here is to establish a strong corps of local leutenants who can act as organizing surrogates within (groups of) mini-campaigns, as well as message surrogates — largely published online, but also in local media — who can convincingly carry the campaign message into a localized political environment and dialect.

Within the Facebook universe, if you have 1000 campaigns — or, really, a few hundred — the 1000-recipient cap on messages isn’t a problem. As a bonus, if you have the whole surrogate thing going on, you’ll get localized language and organizing. As long as the message is coherent and harmonizes well with the Campaign Actual, that should mean big bonus points.

Of course, this is hard. I don’t expect anyone to actually do it, because the kinds of thinking and skills you need for this aren’t present at the senior staff level. People who are at the inner circle level think in terms of message consistency (being on-message) rather than message coherency (making fucking sense). It’s the difference between a campaign enacting the right symbolic gestures and invoking the right keywords on the TeeVee vs. providing actual information to a dedicated corps of peer-to-peer repeaters who will take that information and make their own message product with it.

Trippi about half got this stuff, I think, and ultimately wasn’t all that close to Candidate Dean. It still worked out pretty well, although those were somewhat unique circumstances. Still, I don’t see anyone working on any presidential so far talking like this or making these kinds of moves. The good news is the Open Source campaign will remain an excellent tactic in cycles to come, so we’ll still get a chance to use it.