Measuring the MySpace Primary

Chris Bowers at MyDD recently wrote about the “MySpace Primary” - the race to acquire visibility and support among social networking users. The blog is worth a read, but some of the real action was in the comments, two of which struck me as great observations:

From Shaun Appleby:

Just a couple of comments. The Obama Facebook groups One Million Strong for Barack and Students for Barack Obama (which itself has over 52k members) have discussion boards (equivalent to MyDD diaries) numbering, as of now, 326 and 269 respectively. These attract between a handful to several hundred posts each, averaging out to about a dozen or less, just on a guess. The content of the posts just on a skim are roughly as serious and informed as those at DailyKos, both pro and con, if less self-conciously ‘Democrat’ and seem to cover a range of relevant and frivoulous topics. Seems to me there is some actual content in these groups which qualify them as another ‘branch’ of the netroots whether they are aware of it or not.

I think this is probably right - especially the bit at the end about this being a new branch of the netroots. It requires that we broaden our definition of the netroots to include more than blogs, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t see this developing into a permanent piece of infrastructure, like the blogs. Rather, MySpace and FaceBook - and any other social network - offers the social space and the technical resources for political activity to coalesce for brief periods (a campaign cycle) and then disperse when the goals are met or interests wane. Much like SMS and MySpace allowed students to organize for last spring’s immigration protests.

The next big question is channeling discussion into activism and measurable activity. Metrics in particular will be important to campaigns as they seek to convert “friendship” and popularity on social networks into tangible support. I can think of a couple metrics of the top of my head, but I’m sure there are plenty more (leave ideas in the comments).

• Fundraising: directly to the campaign via ActBlue and a strategy similar to this effort by an Obama FaceBook group; or indirectly, perhaps using ChipIn Widgets and their own social networks to form the Millennial/Internet equivalent of Bush “Pioneers” and “Rangers.”
• In-site advertising: yeah, I mean campaign badges, but I also mean encouraging supporters to change their Pic/Icon to something representative of the campaign. If Barack has 100,000 “friends” in a group that’s great at generating some buzz, and could be indicative of a lot of support, but really means very little in terms of tangibles. However, if 20,000 of those friends all changed their pic/icon to one of Barack Obama - that is worth something because that change would reverberate through MySpace as a visible sign of support appearing on friend lists probably an order of magnitude greater in size. That’s the electronic equivalent of a maildrop or yard sign, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually carried some of the weight of a peer-to-peer contact.

More after the jump.

Micah Sifry wrote (among other things):

2. That gets to my second point. It could also be that we’re just looking where the light is brightest, and the real measure of online action and energy is going to be on the candidates’ sites and in the peripheral support sites that their backers create. I haven’t had the time (yet) to look at all the unofficial groups online for the candidates; nor have I looked at such basic building blocks like Yahoo groups, which were critical to the Dean campaign’s base. The Edwards campaign has built a very robust online platform for its supporters, and I think they could make a very good case that if they manage to attract and engage lots of people directly on their site, their lower MySpace total may matter much less.

I think this is right too. Student sites, OneCorps, MySpace and FaceBook Groups - support among young internet users going to coalesce in a lot of different spaces. It’s all niche now. Lack of support (or greater support) on any one of these sites isn’t a good indicator in and of itself.

Let me throw it open - what metrics do you see, and what tactics do you think are going to be rolled out on these platforms in 2008?