Posts filed under 'MySpace'
Cross-posted on techPresident
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:
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May 4th, 2008
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- Espionage Against Pro-Tibet Groups, Others, Spurred Microsoft Patches.
- New Freedom, and Peril, in Online Criticism of China.
- In every measure, Obama clobbers Clinton online. Also, Barack Obama Takes Lion’s Share of Online Video Viewerships.
- Obama Uses YouTube To Lobby The Public After Losing Pennsylvania.
- Notes from the eCampaigning Forum 2008.
- Cuddle Parties: When Touchy Feely Goes Goofy.
- Why Democrats Rule the Web.
- Smug Alert in SF. Thanks, Slate
- Lost in the Smoke-Filled Room: Unexpected Talent. On the benefits of a primary process. C.f. The Primary ‘Bounce’.
- Government to Seek Terrorists in World of Warcraft: The Full Proposal.
- Welcome to the high-tech age of consumer jihadists. Suggested by Burt Edwards.
- Look Ma, I’m on CIA.gov.
- Anti-war site lets you spend $3 trillion your way.
- Obama’s GOP Shadow.
- Laughing Baby vs. the YouTube Commenters. C.f. The vile state of Internet discourse knows no borders.
- Colbert Snags Clinton, EdWORDS and Obama in One Cast.
- Fight, prefrosh, for social justice — via e-mail.
- Newspaper Ads Drive Online Research, In-Store Purchases.
- Online Advocacy — Using Petitions for List Building.
- Obama Talks About (Internet) Rumors.
- MTV News Still on the Edge of Political News. Kurt Loder rides to the rescue one last time.
- Twitter Away Your Life With Social Networking. And, Is Twittering Sustainable?
- The Twittering Class and the Primaries.
- Tips for success in a Web 2.0 world.
- Do Progressive Techies Have a Google Blind Spot?
- Drive additional web traffic with email.
- Facebook Chat — distraction or benefit?.
- Sick Profits Video Contest. User-generated content goes to the doctor.
- Despite Negative Press, Facebook Is a Powerful Agent for Social Change. But wait: 51% of Donors ‘Not At All Interested’ in Social Networks.
- The New Guards: The Players. A look at potential Republican MoveOn equivalents. C.f. MoveOn.org Asks McCain To Drop Pastor Who Blamed Victims For Katrina.
- EEN’s Avatars Campaign Brings Online Marketing to Life. Online/offline connection.
- Huckabee to follow in Robertson’s footsteps? Yet another independent audience?
- Radiohead Launches Social Network.
- Nerd alert or sublime beauty? Full Earthrise and Earthset in Hi-Def, from the Japanese Kaguya lunar orbiter. I can see my house from here! Via Space.com.
– cpd
April 24th, 2008
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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.
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April 24th, 2008
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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.
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April 6th, 2008
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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.
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April 4th, 2008
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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.
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March 20th, 2008
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Post-Politics Online/pre-SXSW Quick Hits extravaganza.
- Does Good Design Matter? Todd Zeigler’s excellent follow-on to our Politics Online panel. C.f. lots of POLC coverage at Capitol Valley and Tech Daily Dose.
- Trusting Politics 2.0 Can be Difficult in Local Elections.
- Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind.
- Online Video Audience to Hit Critical Mass in ‘08. “Nearly 80 percent of US internet users will watch online video at least once a month in 2008.”
- News and Media US Website Visits Up Sharply. Lindsey Lohan softcore locked in deathmatch with political coverage. C.f. Obama: Bigger than Britney.
- How-To: 6 Tips on Writing an Actionable Press Release. Basic but useful.
- Historically, Most Online Communities Haven’t Stuck. Facebook and MySpace: do not forget the lesson of Ozymandias.
- 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.”
- Did the Clinton Campaign Doctor Obama Footage to Make Him ‘Blacker’?
- Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals.
- McCain’s Unfiltered Blog. Straight conversation.
- Hillary’s pop culture problem vs. Did SNL Save Clinton’s Campaign?
- Is the Obama Campaign Really Different?. Or is he the new New Coke?
- ObamaCycle: A Craigslist for Obama Campaigners.
- Hillary’s Classy Tweets to Ohio and Rhode Island. Not sure “Tweet” and “Classy” belong in the same sentence.
- Air Force Launches Recruitment Campaign Touting Cyber Command. Check out the gee-whiz landing page, and also the fact that the Air Force has blocked access to many (most?) blogs.
- Obama Reaches 1 Million Donor Mark. Check out the comments on Micah Sifry’s article about it.
- Obama does not read blogs. No wonder he has time to run for president.
- 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.”
- Heather Havriskey interview with George Carlin. A must-read for anyone interested in writing or the creative process.
- 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.”
- New Source for News Vetted by Scientists. A peer-reviewed take on social news.
- The Charms of Wikipedia.
- Are Liberals and Conservatives Different Species? The Answer is Yes.
- Extended rant against microsites. Not sure if I agree, but it’s worth reading.
- A Whole Toolbox of Contention.
- ETech: Lessig Calls for Geeks to Code Money Out of Politics.
- Wanted: A More Digital Congress.
- Inside Obama’s Ground Game.
- Hillary’s Rapid Responders.
- Obama Lawyer Crashes Clinton Call. With audio!
- Politico 2.0: Ruffini Blogs, Twitters, Crowdsources Obama Donations. Via tPrez. C.f. Josh’s take on the candidates’ post-Tuesday splash pages
- Flickr and TechSoup to hand out free Flickr Pro accounts to nonprofits.
- Facebook changes political affiliation choices. Michael Whitney and Nancy Scola are not impressed.
- Over 1 million people have seen Robert Greenwald’s anti-McCain online videos.
- Geeking out before checking out: Spacecraft photographs avalanches on Mars. Don’t miss the accompanying Earth/Moon family portrait, taken from Mars orbit — such a cute couple. And, dig the new European automatic robotic space truck. Finally, some good advice for the Coast Guard, and a Farewell to the Dungeon Master.
– cpd
March 6th, 2008
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Check out Priscilla Bryce-Weller’s comment on the Facebook status/advocacy piece from a few days ago:
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.
– cpd
February 22nd, 2008
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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.
– cpd
November 2nd, 2007
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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.
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August 17th, 2007
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M&R Strategic Services has pulled together a nice list of tips for using MySpace (and by extension, other social networking sites) for political advocacy and has published it as a PDF. My favorite: “Be prepared to lose control,” always good advice in a new media environment (or when planning a night out). Other suggestions describe how to build up “friends” by tapping your existing email list, the importance of using your most viral content and how to convert MySpace contacts into long-term advocates. For more advice, see the e.politics section on social networking and social media.
– cpd
November 2nd, 2006
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A good article almost slipped by while I was on vacation: Mike Dorning at the Chicago Tribune wrote an excellent overview of the current state of online electioneering, hitting everything from viral campaigns to microtargeting to good old-fashioned email lists. The lead focuses on a Maryland Comptroller candidate who built 80% of his volunteer base on MySpace and then turned around and won the primary against a two-term incumbent. The article doesn’t expressly state that the MySpace-recruited volunteers are the primary reason that he won, but Justin Perkins at Frogloop is happy to make the leap (hah!). Well worth a read.
– cpd
October 12th, 2006
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Next Friday, September 15th, the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet is hosting a half-day seminar tied to the release of their latest publication, Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content. One of the authors’ names may sound a bit familiar….
The event is free, so how can you possibly pass it up? I’ll see you there.
– cpd
September 5th, 2006
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