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Engage: Commanding the New Tools and Reestablishing Equanimity with the Netroots
Blogs | New PoliticsSan Francisco — On July 2, 4,391 people joined the group "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right," expanding the group by fifty percent. The following day the group added another four thousand or so members. And to date, the group has become the largest on U.S. Senator Barack Obama's very own social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. But by the holiday weekend the growth in membership dropped dramatically. Just under two thousand joined during the 4, 5 and 6 of July combined. Granted it was a holiday weekend, but the trend was evident on Monday, July 7, as well when only 1,627 people signed onto the group. What accounts for this steep decline in interest? Did all of the sudden the well of outspoken activists run dry? Did the Netroots stop caring about FISA and retroactive immunity? While I'd imagine that the latter seems unlikely, the former could be true if weren't for the fact that there is a more plausible explanation based on a significant event that took place right around the time the drop occurred.
At 4:38 Eastern on July 3, Obama responded. Joe Rospars, the campaign's director of new media, posted an entry to his MyBarackObama.com blog containing a response written by Barack Obama addressing the mounting groundswell of dissent. But that's not all. Three members of the campaign's policy staff spent over an hour trying to address comments submitted to the post. In essence, Obama and his presidential campaign made it clear that they are listening even if they are unwilling to capitulate. And it appears that many felt as if being heard was not insignificant. Not only did the number of new members per day drop dramatically after the action taken by the campaign, but there has also been a steady decline in traffic on the group's listserv. 464 messages were sent to the group on July 3 and by the 7th, 218 were sent.
Just to be clear, I don't think the decline in activity surrounding this group should be taken to mean that Obama has suddenly erased the deep concerns that many of his supporters have over his acceptance of the FISA bill. I don't think he has. But what I do think, is that he has dispelled some of the anger by showing that he has not forgotten about a significant number of active supporters and that he is willing to listen and respond. The manner in which the Obama campaign handled the frustrations of its online supporters is very munch in line with something the New Politics Institute (NPI) and NDN have long recommended to organizations and political leaders, engage.
In NPI's New Tools memo "Engage the Blogs" written by Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com, the advice given is to not be afraid of the Netroots but to reach out, interact, and fully engage. That's what Obama did here and his use of the strategy appears to have been a success.
Social Networking: A New Tool Pushed Back in Time by an Old Candidate
Social NetworkingI just blasted away close to $2.8 billion in pork-barrel spending in three minutes using veto lasers and I'm only on level 2 with 4 McCains left. Not too shabby, right? This is all thanks to an application for Facebook created by U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign which, instead of reeling in young people as it is most likely designed to do, serves as a glaring illustration of how poorly they understand the demographic.
"Pork Invaders," as the game is called, is an application that anyone with a Facebook account can install in which the player shoots piggy-banks with vetoes as the piggies move back and forth across the screen dropping small, what appear to be, upside-down crosses at your McCain-logo-box-ship. As you skewer pork with vetoes, you save taxpayers millions, but be sure to keep an eye out for the pork-barrels -- strike down one of those and you're well on your way to balancing the budget and paying off our national debt. And after completing a level, you are rewarded with McCain campaign talking points trashing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's record on earmarks while trumpeting his own. Check out the screen-shot below.
I doubt this venture into the world of social networking will give Obama supporters much to worry about. The game looks like an artifact of the early 1980s and surely those upside-down crosses will not do much to woo fence-sitting Christian conservatives. Moreover, when you look at just the sheer numbers, Obama has around 1,040,000 supporters on Facebook compared to McCain's 150,000. Still, I want to at least commend the McCain campaign for making the effort to reach out through social networks, but releasing an online game that looks painfully out of date will not only remind voters of the candidate's own distance from youth but may also instantiate McCain's recent declaration of computer illiteracy (see Maggie Barker's post), neither association being particularly flattering.
At NDN and the New Politics Institute, we have done a lot of work to help progressives better understand social networking. Click on the link here to find practical guidance on how to best engage social networks, including a memo written by Facebook's chief privacy officer. Below is a video from a recent NPI event during which Beth Kanter, a professional blogger and technology trainer, shares some of her thoughts on how to successfully utilize social networks.
Political Online Advertising: Still Nascent
New PoliticsIn the first four months of 2008 the Obama campaign spent around 3 million dollars on online advertising. Kate Kaye, from techPresident, waded into FEC filings to produce this estimate and given that this campaign is often cited as one of the most tech savvy, this all just goes to show that there is a lot of room for growth in political online advertising.
NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been encouraging organizations to Advertise Online as a part of our New Tools Campaign. In fact, just under a month ago we held a major forum in DC which brought in new experts to give a fresh perspective on the tools. Here's Peter Greenberg, Google's Director of Elections and Issue Advocacy, giving some actionable advice on how to start advertising online:
Zoom in on the Big Donors
For those that like to follow the money trail, The Huffington Post has a new page called Fundrace 2008, which features a nice Google maps mash-up tracking the larger individual campaign donations. You can enter your address to take a look at what kind of donations your neighbors are making or zoom out to get a sense of where the candidates are getting their big donor support.
A few bloggers have cleverly used this tool to point out another manifestation of the Microsoft-Google rivalry. Google employees gave more to Obama, while Microsoft workers, overall, threw their monetary support behind Hillary. Could these two tech giants present a metaphor for the competing candidates' arguments? The older, more established, more experienced Microsoft vs. a younger company representing a different generation and a bottom-up business model...There might be something there.
This new web tool should be commended as it shines a little more sunslight on our politicial process; on the other hand, I imagine that for those that donate it could start to feel a little too sunny.
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