MyMoney MySpace

And step 2 for MySpace in the Presidential Primary Social Networking Extravaganza is to bank on the fundraising apparatus and all the great bugaboos that go along with it namely tracking names, commitments, and all other personal information for a given donor that is identifying him or herself with a given candidate.

I have to admit when ActBlue first started, as a campaign person I was terrified about the idea of going through a 3rd party with our fundraising. Someone other than us would have copies of our lists, our donors, their personal information, and anyone who worked there or interned might have access to mountains of personal data about our contributors.

Over time with more use of ActBlue I became a little more relaxed mostly because it was a clearly partisan organization. Opposition was not a threat. Last cycle I read their Privacy Policy over and over and over again before I finally started to learn how I could use it to my own benefit.
“Other than as described above, we will not use your personal information nor release it to any other party without your permission, unless we believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.”

Where MySpace differs is that they are playing both sides of the fence, they are owned by a confessed conservative, and they aren’t in it to help candidates fundraise from the grassroots like ActBlue but rather

“to track and monitor online donations made to presidential candidates through its MySpace subsidiary, giving the media group an increasingly prominent role in the 2008 presidential election.” Financial Times

My initial fears about ActBlue derived from a “we’ve never seen this before” kind of experience and while I’ll admit there is no precedent for what MySpace is doing it seems dangerous to me to just have someone watching finance traffic flow for no particular reason. I mean what’s next? Monitoring our online chats?

Then there is the question of what the point is? If you look at the New Era Colorado MySpace you can fill a nice volunteer form right there from the MySpace page and it is sent to their own data gathering location. And ActBlue gives you this swanky HTML code so you can encourage people to give to candidates you support. So…. Right… ???

General Manager of public affairs at MySpace Mr. Jeff Berman says they “view this as we view all of our initiatives: it emanates from what our users are telling us they want.”

Something tells me this is the Republicans who are asking for this or telling them what they want. They need their own little ActBlue – bless their hearts. It makes sense they are so behind the curve on all other Web 2.0 advancements they haven’t figured out how to integrate 3rd party sites into their own much less have their own sites talk to a myspace page.

“MySpace said it had not decided whether it would monitor donations made via the tool. “We have not made any decisions about whether we will even track the data,” the company said. “These judgments have not been made. We are at a very early stage.”” FT

‘Comeon… anyone believe that? I send a mass email and I’m glued to my screen looking at click throughs. Can you image what it might look like to track contributions for every single presidential candidate compare that with average MySpace clicks – how many users are going to Impact – how many of those are contributing. Then look at it by demographics, areas of the country, even sexual preference – since those things are all identifiers and searchable via MySpace. Monitor? And to monitor it must record, right? This is really questionable.

Tracy Westen, chief executive of the Center for Governmental Studies, a non-partisan research organisation, said News Corp’s involvement in online candidate fundraising “raised interesting questions...To create a website that a candidate can use to raise money might be viewed as a contribution.”

And the FEC thought they might get to take a vacation soon...

I couldn’t get anyone to respond from ActBlue about ways they plan to grow and expand into the social networking world. For now I’m thinking that Dems still have the edge on online fundraising. I feel uneasy about NewsCorp monitoring cash flow and I hardly see the benefit to campaigns and candidates particularly democratic campaigns. But I say Republican candidates should go wild since they don't have much of an alternative or any real understanding of the internet to begin with.....

You see... its this series of tubes... Ted Stevens gets me every time.

Happy Friday everybody!