OMG! WARNING: Over the top, offensive humor! Note comment: “Godwin’s Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
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:
Okay, it’s not exactly a robot zombie army, but it might have a similar effect on the world of political action — an email arrived today from the Obama campaign about a training program they’re starting which aims to educate a cadre of activists in the essentials of community organizing. Using Obama’s own organizing experience as a hook, the campaign pitches the Obama Organizing Fellowships as “a program that’s going to train a new generation of leaders — not only to help us win this election, but to help strengthen our democracy in communities across the country.”
The message doesn’t say how many Fellows will be trained or where, but it does give you the opportunity to make a donation, to invite a friend to help or even to volunteer to house a Fellow. Obviously the campaign is investing in this project in order to help get Obama elected, and a Fellow’s most important job will be to help that task along (note that the program is a tool for the general election at this point, not the primaries), but after that they’ll be turned loose to wander the Earth on their own, where some will no doubt use their new-found powers for good or ill.
Seriously, with an unprecedented number of people politically activated this year, and with the campaigns as well as outside groups like my friends at the New Organizing Institute training campaign workers and volunteers in the essentials of political action online and off, I can’t help but think that we’re going to be left with a ton of new people fired up about politics and armed with the tools to put their ideas to work. Some will fail and others will lose interest, but the rest may just start to change the ways things are done locally and up the political chain. THAT would be robot-zombie-army fun to watch.
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.”
If you’re trapped in the office on this pre-holiday-weekend Friday, check out the Obamafier from Slate. Not a translator, but clever way to show off some pretty painful Obama puns in the form of random definitions from the “Encyclopedia Baracktannica.” And they very cleverly made it a widget so that we can embed it and give them free publicity:
Early this morning, Sen. Barack Obama sent the first of three text messages to supporters who’ve signed up to his messaging program and live in the D.C. area. It’s a jam-packed message, starting out with an Obama quote, then asking supporters to forward the text to their friends. Most importantly, the text provides an 866 number to call to find your polling location. All you’d have to do is click on the number on your cellphone to make the free call.
Jose has detail about the campaign’s ability to target messages by zip code, and also about how quiet they’re being about the size of their list and its response rate. Texting for turnout isn’t an original idea, but this campaign seems focused on implementing it well — a part of the campaign that future online political professionals will look to as a model?
The Democratic presidential contest finally landed in DC over the last couple of weeks, with the Clinton and Obama campaigns gunning for a share of the rich lode of Democratic voters in the diverse neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan. Obama struck first and hard last Saturday morning, with a parade down Mount Pleasant Street complete with a Latin band in an open-back work truck (stand-up bass, vocals, guitar, percussion) and a few cars along for company (note: only one Volvo visible, in this case a fairly battered 240 wagon). Good targeting: at 11 on a cold Saturday morning, the Mount Pleasant yup/hipsters haven’t even slipped on their skinny jeans yet, and the sidewalk traffic is largely Salvodoran.
Since then, the campaigns’ supporters have hung out on local street corners at various high-traffic times, waving signs and soliciting honks from supportive drivers — Clintonistas retook Mount Pleasant Street with a powerful infantry contingent a week after the Obama raid, while a ton of Obamans were out on U Street Friday evening, targeting partiers heading to Adams Morgan. In my neighborhood at least, the bulk of the public Clinton supporters have been latin women, while the Obamaramans tend tend to be younger and more nonprofity. Of course, we’re looking at an online component here, since the small sample of volunteers I talked with had organized via email, getting a neighborhood rendezvous time from the campaign and then dividing up the area in person once they met.
The TV people tell me that DC’s going to go for Obama, a not unexpected result — while this may not quite be Chocolate City any more, it sure as hell ain’t vanilla either — but Clinton’s folks aren’t giving up on on latin voters, who’ve held strong for her in other areas. Tuesday’s gonna be fun.
Update: More news on the Obama surge from the Cafe Press primary: “After being nearly tied two weeks ago in weekly candidates sales (Obama at 28%, Hillary at 26%), now as of last week, Obama has surged to account for 48%, while Hillary is down to 19% of weekly candidate sales.” More here, and thanks to John Hlinko for the tip.
Hillary Clinton’s Online/Offline Town Hall. She’ll take questions via email, text and video, with Bill and Chelsea (among others) hosting satellite town halls around the country.
Republicans make Fox News sick. “To recap New Hampshire for Fox News: Hannity was pursued by a Republican mob, O’Reilly got into a shoving match with an Obama aide, and CNN grabbed more viewers. Now that’s a week to remember!”
The Day After. The end of the Edwards campaign, through the eyes of his blogger outreach staffer.
Australia wild party child turns party pro. My teenaged near-namesake uses MySpace to promote a party, 500 “friends” show up and do $20,000 worth of damage. Delanys everywhere are extremely proud. Via my friend Doug McCammon.
Josh Levy noted yesterday and Jose Antonio Vargas picks up today that Barack Obama has already received online donations from more than 100,000 people since the beginning of the year. 50,000 per week! Extremely impressive, and a demonstration of what a popular rather than a niche candidate can do when his supporters get fired up (sorry Paulites, that he’s stealing your online oomph, though congratulations on beating both Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani in Michigan). As Josh puts it,
One thing’s for sure, though: Obama’s on fire, possibly raising more money from more people online than he or anyone else every has before.
At last week’s tech project management workshop, a software developer from Community IT Innovators talked about a worldwide collaboration that’s plenty nerd-cool but also gives political communicators something to chew on. Late last year, a group of 30 or 40 software developers scattered around the world gathered for a live debugging session. They were working together to fix final problems in the next version of the open source content management system Joomla, and they used five key (and either cheap or free) technologies to work together:
Skype. They began the session with an internet conference call to get everyone on the same page and assign basic tasks
Chat. To communicate quickly as they moved through the process of fixing bugs, they used IRC. Instant Messaging would have been an alternative.
Screensharing. When they ran into problems that needed a picture rather than words, they used free screen-sharing software. This way, a developer in India (for instance) could show a developer in Europe what he was doing and either get or give help.
Google Spreadsheet. They used a Google Docs spreadsheet (also free) to track changes and allow all participants to view the project’s status and make updates.
Face-to-face. Many of the developers were gathered in small groups and could help each other directly, turning to their online colleagues only when needed.
Obviously, this was a group of power-users rather than newbies, but the tech tools they used are available to anyone in the world with a decent internet connection (and IRC and Google Docs will work over dial-up). Besides the political implications of their project — many advocacy campaigns are using Joomla and similar CMSs to build websites and maintain them easily — political communicators shouldn’t ignore the potential of distant collaboration that this example illustrates. From environmental work to democracy-building to media relations, the ‘net provides tools that make it infinitely easier than ever before to organize and communicate across borders — or across the building. Most political users will obviously lag behind the tech elite in adopting them, but these applications are so useful (and cheap) that even the tech-averse can’t ignore them forever.
Two recent stories by The Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas illuminate the vital connection between online and offline organizing. The first, written last week with Peter Slevin, focuses on voter turnout operations in Iowa and opens with this nugget about the Obama campaign:
In Sen. Barack Obama’s Iowa headquarters, young staff members sit at computers, analyzing online voter data and targeting potential backers. They zip one e-mail to an undecided voter and zap a different message to a firm supporter.
Depending on the voter, they follow with Facebook reminders, telephone calls, text messages and, most important, house visits.
Our organizing plan for 2008 has one critical component: you.
Next month, we’re asking you — and we’re relying on you — to stand up and take ownership of your own neighborhood. It’s a key part of our 50-State Strategy, and the cornerstone of our plan for Democratic victory in 2008.
On Saturday, November 3rd we need you to host your friends and neighbors for the first national organizing event of the Presidential race — months ahead of the Republicans, and a year before we elect a Democratic president.
I love these guys — they actually get it. An activist list is more than an ATM; it’s made up of real live people who want to DO something. Previous DNC emails have asked readers to send a thank-you note to volunteers, to participate in advocacy-style email-your-congressmember campaigns and to use the committee’s Party Builder online organizing application. Each message has a fundraising link, of course, but raising money is usually secondary to building a connection with list members and encouraging them to act — either nationally or locally.
By comparison, the Republican party emails over the past few months have largely been scare messages about Hillary Clinton (actual sample subject line, verbatim: “Waiting for Hillary’s Judicial Nominees????”) or MoveOn.org, tied to an explicit ask for cash. No offline organizing, no opportunity to actually participate in the campaign — all they seem to want is your money. As a lefty, let me be the first to say, keep it up RNC!
Update: A proud DNC staffer has pointed out the success of one of those advocacy actions, with last week’s request for messages to Congress supporting Children’s Health Insurance Program expansion yielding almost 200,000 responses. Impressive, particularly since they made people write their own note rather than just click to send a pre-written one.
