Posts for August 12th, 2006

As the 2006 campaign is coming into the primaries, I recently lunch with a friend from Conde Nast who asked my opinion on whether social networks would have a significant impact on the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. After our lunch, I glanced at my email inbox and found a newsletter from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet which quoted an article (from researcher Riki Parikh) entitled “Will the MySpace Phenomenon Change Politics?“.

Just this week, the KerryPAC sent out a job description on looking for an Online Communications Director who would be “responsible for online community outreach and organizing, including strategy development, working with external/internal blogs and social networking sites, online organizing, e-mail campaign creation, and Internet-related project management.” In my start-up consulting business, I recently met with a company that was trying to offer something that resembled Essembly-lite. And just yesterday, the IPDI announced a conference on the issue of social networks entitled “Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content in Politics” on September 15th in Washington, DC.

What was amusing about the synergy these threads is that social networks is becoming the topic de-jour
in the political realm.

Will MySpace and YouTube change the way the Beltway does politics? IMHO - Nah.
Every day, in the past two years, I have heard about MySpace and YouTube - this week, Fortune had an article on the “MySpace Boys”. YouTube founders were getting fawned over on Good Morning America and other magazines. The impact of videos on the YouTube site are sited as contributory reasons for Lieberman’s downfall to the Lamont Internet-friendly campaign.

But I would bet that when you ask any seasoned campaign professional - what will the real impact of social networks be in the political process, I believe you will hear in 2008 social networks will be a nice hype story, but the networks will not be as effective as they can be in terms of what is needed for political campaigns. And, because the campaign cycle is already upon us, campaigns will not work to use these networks effectively due to their high human cost and low return.

But I make one caveat - the only way social networks will have some REAL impact will be if campaigns dedicate the energy/resources to make them effective OR to let their supporters within these networks have REAL control over the messages in a fashion as described as virtual precinct captains.
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