Registration and Social Networking

So MySpace has launched a new area dedicated to the 2008 election. Called MySpace Impact, the site will link to candidates "official" web profiles, allow MySpace users to donate to the candidates (not yet a live feature), and resurrect MySpace's ill-fated voter registration partnership with Norman Lear's Declare Yourself.

Fred Stutzman at Tech President mostly nails it on why this is a pretty lame development. But here's a couple thoughts of my own.

I'm really interested in the idea of Social Networking sites operating as a de facto Board of Elections and registering new voters. I've heard that FaceBook is also going to set up something similar and attempt to register their current crop of users, as well as anyone who creates a new account on the site (potentially integrated into the registration process, like a mobile voter for the internet).

As a low-cost way of reaching millions of unregistered voters, the potential is huge. Text messaging gets a lot of credit as an organizing tool for last spring's immigration protests, but MySpace had a role as well. In this respect, the digital divide is less and less of an issue. Social networking may not reach everyone, but as a value added it sure as hell expands the reach of and lowers the barrier to entry to our political system. Certainly more so than our current model of voter registration.

That's why it's strange to me that this didn't work (at least not well) when Declare Yourself tried last cycle. Rock the Vote registered millions of new voters online in 2004, so why couldn't Declare Yourself and MySpace do the same in 2006? Was it the off-year? Is Rock the Vote's brand so big that it gobbles up the market of new voters? Or was the program just executed badly? All three are probably a little bit right, but it strikes me that the last reason might be most significant.

It seems clear to me that this program's success will depend on how well they roll it out, and right now, I'm underwhelmed. As Fred notes, MySpace Impact is just a straight up ad for candidates. There's no real interactivity. They're not giving you badges to register your friends on your person profile page. There's no way to track how many friends you registered or anything else that would make the process of online political participation interesting. If this is going to work, it will be because the political aspects are fully integrated into the MySpace platform. Ghettoizing it to a separate (and lame) area is going to hamstring the effort - no matter how many banner ads they use to promote it.

Exemplifying this whole discussion is the actual registration page currently employed. It contains an advertisement for Fast Food Nation (in theaters soon!). FYI, that movie came out last year. Usually it's customary to update your site when rolling out a new revamping an old product. If I really needed to register today, I would have about zero confidence that this was legitimate and was going to work. It looks like an orphaned web page.

I have similar doubts about the fundraising model MySpace Impact plans to introduce. My question is this - will it allow users to raise money for candidates on their profile pages and make fundraising a viral and empowering activity? Or will this just be a way to siphon voters to a candidate's paypal account? The former is exciting and interesting. The latter is totally uninspired and another instance of where this year's campaigns would be regressing from 2004.

The poster child of Web 2.0 embracing a Web 1.0 political model . . . will people's heads explode? More likely it will either go unnoticed as more politics as usual, or the media will continue to report on it as if it was a groundbreaking use of technology in political campaigns. Meanwhile, MySpace Impact won't do nearly as well as it could.