Thursday, February 7, 2008
Social Networking and Politics: My Experiences with Facebook, Change.org, & my.BarackObama.com
For the last couple of weeks I have been engaged in three social networks relating to my interests in progressive politics and specific social causes. I found mixed results using Facebook, Change, and myBarackObama based on the scale of the network and how they are designed/used.
I am no novice when it comes to using social networks. I had been an active Facebook and MySpace for the last couple years, but I've only used it to communicate with friends and acquitances. Prior to this academic initiative, I had used Facebook to research online politics but relied more heavily on the candidates' official websites for policy positions and background.
In order of joining, I signed up for Facebook's 1,000,000 Strong for Obama group; three courses on Change.org; and lastly began blogging on my.BarackObama.com.
Facebook
I wasn't impressed with Facebook as a tool for politics. The 1,000,000 strong campaign was to me the same effort of a Web 1.0 static site. The page pointed people to official Barack Obama webpages and pointed people to take action. Their was nothing inherently dynamic about the group, but the one element that I noticed was effective was the news feed. After joining the Obama group, Facebook dynamically added my action to the news feed of all of my 200+ friends. Whether it was directly a ripple from my action, I noticed several of my friends also join the network within 24-48 hours from me. I didn't ask them if it was serenpedity, but I did receive in my news feed their action. If it was directly because of my action, this has nothing to do with the group's administrators but more-so on my stepping into a "Connector" role and Facebook's overall archetecture.
Change.org
Change.org has been a huge waste of time in my opinion. I was active in posting comments, taking action alerts, and writing commentary but nobody responded and I didn't feel like I was engaging in active groups (although the system showed it active). Instead it was more like I was posting to a bulletin board that may or may not have been read. To compare this to my experience with Facebook, I would assume that the smaller scale of Change impacted the result. I hadn't built a community of friends on Change and was low on the todum pole. But I am also skeptical that they're running a sound ship. They were sending me regularly emails, but to take action on campaigns that were irrelovent to the interests that I originally signed up for. I lost confidence in their brand and don't intend to be as active as I was when I first started off.
My.BarackObama.com
Obama's official campaign site was the most innovative and dynamic. I first decided to join the network through a plug on Facebook. It didn't cause my instantanous action, but after some thought -- and my lost confidence in Change -- I signed up. They're success is two-fold in my minds-eye. First, they're the only successful push-marketing group. I received numerous messages from Barack, Michelle, volunteers, and others. Each message was relevant, but prior to Super Duper Tuesday; they did over-do it and send me multiple messages in one day. The messages always had an ask, they were brief, and also were informative. The other two networks were passive and relied on pull (except for the news feed). The second thing that I felt really interesting was my.barackobama.com's ranking of activists. They gave points for every action and compared my contributions with the tens of thousands of others on the network. This reminds me of th Wikipedia and Amazon.com phenomenon of energizing an army of authors and editors to work for free. Each want recognition and to build up their personal brand. So too is Obama's desire with this effort. I get nothing in return besides a pat-on-the-back from a website and a listing in a CRM database. But as I moved up from 80,000th to 50,000th best activist I was drawn to do more to get down to 30,000th. This incentivizes the user to stay active and keeps the supportor in the Obama camp.
So...I'm really tired and am not sure that anything I wrote is going to be coherent, but as the Potomac Primary as nearing, I thought it appropriate to discuss how I'm going to be refocusing my efforts to advance Obama's campaign through blogging on his site and linking to it from other mediums.
I am no novice when it comes to using social networks. I had been an active Facebook and MySpace for the last couple years, but I've only used it to communicate with friends and acquitances. Prior to this academic initiative, I had used Facebook to research online politics but relied more heavily on the candidates' official websites for policy positions and background.
In order of joining, I signed up for Facebook's 1,000,000 Strong for Obama group; three courses on Change.org; and lastly began blogging on my.BarackObama.com.
I wasn't impressed with Facebook as a tool for politics. The 1,000,000 strong campaign was to me the same effort of a Web 1.0 static site. The page pointed people to official Barack Obama webpages and pointed people to take action. Their was nothing inherently dynamic about the group, but the one element that I noticed was effective was the news feed. After joining the Obama group, Facebook dynamically added my action to the news feed of all of my 200+ friends. Whether it was directly a ripple from my action, I noticed several of my friends also join the network within 24-48 hours from me. I didn't ask them if it was serenpedity, but I did receive in my news feed their action. If it was directly because of my action, this has nothing to do with the group's administrators but more-so on my stepping into a "Connector" role and Facebook's overall archetecture.
Change.org
Change.org has been a huge waste of time in my opinion. I was active in posting comments, taking action alerts, and writing commentary but nobody responded and I didn't feel like I was engaging in active groups (although the system showed it active). Instead it was more like I was posting to a bulletin board that may or may not have been read. To compare this to my experience with Facebook, I would assume that the smaller scale of Change impacted the result. I hadn't built a community of friends on Change and was low on the todum pole. But I am also skeptical that they're running a sound ship. They were sending me regularly emails, but to take action on campaigns that were irrelovent to the interests that I originally signed up for. I lost confidence in their brand and don't intend to be as active as I was when I first started off.
My.BarackObama.com
Obama's official campaign site was the most innovative and dynamic. I first decided to join the network through a plug on Facebook. It didn't cause my instantanous action, but after some thought -- and my lost confidence in Change -- I signed up. They're success is two-fold in my minds-eye. First, they're the only successful push-marketing group. I received numerous messages from Barack, Michelle, volunteers, and others. Each message was relevant, but prior to Super Duper Tuesday; they did over-do it and send me multiple messages in one day. The messages always had an ask, they were brief, and also were informative. The other two networks were passive and relied on pull (except for the news feed). The second thing that I felt really interesting was my.barackobama.com's ranking of activists. They gave points for every action and compared my contributions with the tens of thousands of others on the network. This reminds me of th Wikipedia and Amazon.com phenomenon of energizing an army of authors and editors to work for free. Each want recognition and to build up their personal brand. So too is Obama's desire with this effort. I get nothing in return besides a pat-on-the-back from a website and a listing in a CRM database. But as I moved up from 80,000th to 50,000th best activist I was drawn to do more to get down to 30,000th. This incentivizes the user to stay active and keeps the supportor in the Obama camp.
So...I'm really tired and am not sure that anything I wrote is going to be coherent, but as the Potomac Primary as nearing, I thought it appropriate to discuss how I'm going to be refocusing my efforts to advance Obama's campaign through blogging on his site and linking to it from other mediums.
Labels: Barack Obama, change.org, facebook
// posted by Jason Langsner @ 10:00 PM 
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