The folks at Slate have embraced widgets with a vengeance this year. Well, if you were Clinton or Obama, you’d certainly think of their widgets as being on the vengeful side of things. First there was the Obamafier, a fun take on the Obamamania that seemed to be sweeping the nation a couple of months ago (now…?). The latest widget from “the online magazine for the smarty-pants set” takes their popular Hillary Clinton Deathwatch feature (successor the the Aberto Gonzalez Deathwatch, among others) and makes it portable, so you can put it on your Facebook profile, MySpace page, etc. Why not install it now, while you’re waiting for results from Indiana and North Cackalackie? Go ahead, I dare you.
I’d planned to make the Deathwatch widget last week’s Friday Fun episode, but when my friend Rich MacKinnon installed it on his Facebook page, it started streaming porn images (bonus!) and I put it off until we knew more. He even wrote the incident up for Slashdot, but perhaps it was an isolated event, because he got no Slashdot traction and when I got ’round to installing the critter on Facebook and e.politics today, no such luck for me (damn). Give it a try and see what you find, though…you cain’t hardly GET enough porn on that there interweb, I tell you what.
Yesterday’s Facebook article generated some fantastic comments both here and on the techPresident version, with plenty of things to chew on for a while, and you guys are crazy if you miss out on them. So, let’s gather ‘em up in one easy bundle and take ‘em on home.
First, Mark Rovner from Sea Change Strategies weighed in here on e.politics in typically vivid style:
I hate to risk alienating my new BFF Mark Zuckerberg, but has Facebook’s moment in the sun as a hot political tool passed? And if so, what does that tell us about the future of social networking sites for online political organizing, and even about the future of Facebook itself?
We’ve now seen more than a year of intense use of social networking sites by the U.S. presidential campaigns (and even longer use by issue-advocacy groups), which gives us a solid base of information and experience to judge just how effective Facebook is as a political tool — both for organized political campaigns and advocacy groups and for individual political activists. The verdict? Facebook has not lived up to a lot of its initial political hype, and for reasons that are perfectly natural considering what kind of a site it is. The crux:
Henry Copeland of Blogads: “As the social media winter looms, the winners will be the folks with strong relationships, low overheads, a strong commitment on innovation rather than coat-tail riding, and, most of all, a indelible passion for the business. We’re looking forward to seeing you after the bust.”
As the Democratic primary process grinds on, the candidates’ supporters are using just about every electronic tool available to swing the race their way. Two cases in point from the Obama side: super.del.egates.us is a wiki-based contact list for voters to use to reach the precious unpledged delegates to the Democratic Convention, while Yrmomma4obama aims to help young voters (and those too young to vote themselves) to use text messages to persuade their friends and family to jump on the Obama bandwagon.
Along with Dennis Johnson, Karen Jagoda and Morra Aarons-Mele, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation this morning on congressional and local online campaigns for the assembled journalists at the Knight Digital Media Center’s symposium, Election ’08: Unleashing the Cyber-watchdogs (i.e., after a week of luxuriating in the California sun, it was time to sing for my supper and justify the trip). My notes are below; if they’re too cryptic, drop me a note for details.
A Pulitzer ain’t half-bad, my friend: online politics reporter Jose Antonio Vargas joined a distinguished list of Post reporters hit with Pulitzer prizes this week. He’s one of several reporters cited for work on last year’s Virginia Tech shootings, and he owes his part of the prize in part to Facebook: as he said yesterday,
I wrote two of the nine articles in the breaking news entry; the first was an eyewitness account (penned with another reporter) that ran on the front page, the second was a feature on how students used the Web to console each other. And it was all because of luck — and Facebook. On the day of the shooting, less than three hours after the rampage, I landed a phone interview with Trey Perkins, who sat in the back of Room 207 when shooter Seung Hui Cho barged in. I found Trey on Facebook, friended him, chatted with him on AIM and convinced him to talk to me on the phone. It ended up being the key interview of the day.
A little luck, and a lot of initiative. Congratulations!
This just in from Bergen County, New Jersey: online politics has hit town and the locals are taking to it with gusto, like a guido to gold chains. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and blogs all make an appearance as North Jersey Record reporter Matthew Van Dusen interviews area politicos attempting to use the internet to influence policy or elect a candidate. It’s up to e.politics to put it all in context:
Some viral campaigns have proved effective at the national level, said Colin Delaney [sic], the founder of e.politics, a Washington, D.C.-based Web site about online political advocacy. For instance, Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia lost his seat in 2006 after a video surfaced of him calling a man “macaca.”
Delaney believes that candidates at the local level, however, will still be able to win races through traditional campaigning for years to come.
“I don’t think it’s going to be something that every local candidate will do,” Delaney said of the viral techniques.
Hi y’all, I gave a social media marketing training in New York on Monday, and I developed something for it that you might be able to use. The training was for the web staff of the local chapters of a large national nonprofit, and we covered the basics of using tools like blogs, online video, social networking sites and email lists and discussion groups to promote their activities and help with membership and fundraising. As a takeaway (a trick I learned from Michael Bassik — if you can, leave a little something behind for the crowd), I created a cheap sheet that looks at the basic social media marketing tools, their pros and cons, and the essential considerations involved in a social media campaign. Here’s a link to the PDF; details are below.
Greetings from New Orleans and the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where e.politics is bearing up nobly under the strain of going to fantastic cities and hanging out with bright and interesting people. Rough life, I know
As a takeaway for the participants in our online advocacy panel on Friday, below are a ton of articles on various aspects of the question of spreading a message and working to change politics and policy online.
Crowd Enabling, the Obama way. A mighty bold claim: “Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics.”
Quote of the week: “‘It’s a love tap compared to the Wu-Tang fist of fury that’s coming at this guy in the fall,’ said Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant.”
Facebook Launches Band Pages. “MySpace also might start to get worried — I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses that site solely for auditioning bands.”
Update:Primary Season Signals Adoption of Online Ads by Political Campaigns. “Not only are those ads relatively inexpensive; they’ve allowed often cash-strapped campaigns to determine whether their dollars were well spent, before voters went to the polls.” Lots of details in this one.
Politics and tax top US search league. Also note that Huckabee’s site outdrew McCain’s by 50% in January, and that Obama’s site had double the traffic of Hillary’s and four times that of McCain’s.
U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft. Juan Cole replies:
“The recent alarmism about terrorist activity in virtual worlds seems designed to prey on the fears of the Internet common among the Great Unwired. Most of the concerns are simply unreasonable.”
We did this in Australia last week. Our parliament apologised on behalf of previous governments to Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generations. We suggested to both our Facebook and MySpace friends that they change their status to “is sorry” on the day of the apology. Lots of people did, and as an added extra, hundreds of people joined our cause that day.
Excellent way to get an issue out in the public eye, and obviously in this case it benefited the folks encouraging people to do it. On the same article, also check out Briton Mark Pack’s comment on Facebook’s use in UK elections:
Using status in this way is a pretty common campaigning technique in the UK, though what’s become more popular here (at least in the Liberal Democrats) is changing your profile picture to a graphic that says you are backing / have voted for a particular candidate.
Also clever — clearly, this is a promising tool to help activists spread political messages. Facebook users are bombarded by tons of messages and group invitations, but even when they tune those out, they’ll still see their friends’ status and picture.
Interesting new development in the world of social networking, with Google announcing the creation of a platform for Facebook Application-like tools that can run on more than one social networking site. The initial partners include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. TechCrunch goes into some detail about the implications; be sure to check out the comments thread.
When I first heard about it, I didn’t realize that MySpace was involved, as you can see in my quote on page 2 of the current Campaigns & Elections magazine Campaign Insider, where I’m a bit skeptical about the immediate political effects. Having MySpace involved could really make OpenSocial a more useful tool for U.S. political advocacy, since the site’s audience in the States is so much larger than those of all the other social networking sites besides Facebook combined.
Still, Facebook apps have yet to revolutionize online political advocacy, though Facebook groups certainly have their political uses (alas, not enough oomph to get Stephen Colbert on the ballot). As I said at the end of the C&E article, “Honestly, we don’t know how much these things matter…we haven’t gone through an election cycle [yet] in which MySpace and Facebook are going to play a major role.” My prediction: soc nets will have their place, but most campaigns will raise more money and organize more volunteers for real-world action using good, old-fashioned email.
An excellent article on the Wild Apricot blog arrived ealier via a Google Alert — it’s an interview with Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of the U.S. about using social networking sites for advocacy and fundraising. She and blog author Soha El-Borno go into useful detail about working with Facebook Causes and the Care2 and Change.org applications as well as managing Facebook groups, and they also talk about the differences between working with the Facebook audience and that of MySpace. (more…)
Hi folks, I’m just back from a long weekend whitewater rafting in West Virginia — nothing like a solid dose of 55-degree water and sheer terror to focus the mind. A bunch of potential articles have piled up over the four days I’ve been out of the loop, so let’s get started.
First up, Kira Marchenese at Environmental Defense has been learning a lot in the past few weeks about using Facebook for political organizing, and she’s put together some quick bullet points about its strengths that she’s graciously allowed me to reprint. Rumor has it that Republican candidates and causes have been using the site more effectively than progressives — lefties, take note.
