Campaign Review

Update: I should note that I jumped the gun a little with this review. SFBO has not officially launched yet. I just happened to key into their prelaunch because I read the Barack the Youth Vote blog. The Obama campaign has contacted me to say they are aware of a lot of these issues and appreciate the feedback. So let them know what you'd like to see in future iterations in the comments, and bear in mind that I'm reviewing a beta product here.
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This is part of a running series of campaign youth website reviews. In previous installments I reviewed John Edward's OneCorp and Mark Warners's Youthroots.

Co-opted by the campaign months ago, Students for Barack Obama launched their new website this week. After their impressive emergence via FaceBook and demonstrated ability to turn Facebook energy into bodies on the ground, I was looking to see something equally impressive.

What I saw was basically a funnel. The new SFBO website is - mostly - a directory that allows visitors to find a local chapter or create their own chapter where none exists. Whichever option you choose, the site will funnel you into MyBarackObama.com, the campaign's social network organizing vehicle. Aside from links to the official Barack Obama FaceBook group and YouTube page, almost every link on the site directs the user into the main campaign website. That's not necessarily a bad thing - when I interviewed Tobin Van Ostern, one of the founders of Students for Barack Obama, he indicated that FaceBook wasn't scaling sufficiently as an organizing tool to accommodate the group's needs. Now that SFBO are an official part of the campaign, it makes sense to integrate their operations with the larger campaign infrastructure. But there's a lot missing here.

No, this isn't one of my campaign website reviews . I'd love to write one about Barack's site, but I don't have time at the moment.

So instead, I point you to this review, which also offers some general advice to campaigns looking to become involved in social networking:

With all social networks or communities, the ultimate question to be answered is "What goal is the technology helping achieve?" In the case of Obama's network, it really isn't clear what purpose the network serves. Sure, I can log in and find other people, or blog, look up an event, but isn't that much easier on a site like Facebook, where the Obama group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) already has 250,000 members? Ironically, Obama himself doesn't even belong to this group (Note to the Obama web people, wake up and embrace the social media). By attempting to create a social network to solve a need that other social networks have solved, is Obama just reinventing the wheel?

In the 2008 election cycles, different networks will serve different purposes. Facebook, Myspace and the other premier social networks will undoubtedly serve as connection vectors for followers of political candidates. Why? Network effect. There are always going to be more people on Myspace or Facebook than on Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Sam Brownback's social network. As such, it is absolutely important for campaigns to realize that they'll always be competing with (and losing to) these social networks. So what good does a private label network provide?

The answer lies in answering situationally relevant information needs of individuals in a simple, low-involvement fashion. The candidate's social network should serve as the nexus of information about the candidate. It should be the place that I can go to to find anything and everything about the candidate, information about events, snippets and facts I can blog about, heavy integration of social media such as Flickr or Youtube so I can experience everything about the candidate in a single place. It should not try to act as the sole vector between the candidate's supporters. In fact, doing so could be significantly harmful, as it might give supporters the impression that this private-label group is the only netgroup that supports the candidate, obviously leaving aside the millions that support the candidate in other groups.

I think the author gives too much credence to the idea that campaign social networks will never compete with existing networks like MySpace and FaceBook. Of course he's right - they never will - but that's not really the point. The point is that there is a segment of voters who will be hungry for more intimate involvement with the campaign than can be provided by a FaceBook group. Candidate created social networks allow for that involvement. They can be more focused channels of social network energy.

If you want to know what the results of that are - look no further than the grassroots base of the Dean campaign and the corresponding financial muscle they lent to his candidacy. Obviously the next step in this election is to actually turn that energy into votes. Also, the no-brainer here is that in-house social networks appeal to a lot of folks who don't know what FaceBook is or think that MySpace is occupied only by 15 year olds and sexual deviants.

This is the second in a series of reviews of democratic presidential campaign websites dedicated to young voters. As I previously outlined, my purpose in writing these is to provide a useful critique that our presidential contenders can use to improve their outreach to younger voters. The first review in this series examined YouthRoots, a project of Mark Warner’s now-defunct presidential campaign.

This second review will focus on John Edwards and the One America Committee. Currently, the One American Committee does not have a youth-specific program, making this a somewhat akward and out-of-bound review for my chosen topic. However, what One America does have is One Corps - an interesting program that I think overlaps philosophically and technologically with elements that can make for a solid campaign to engage voters under 30.

Still in Beta, One Corps is an attempt to build a social network for local activism. A facile yet easily graspable description might be to say that it attempts to mashup the social networking of Friendster with the online-to-offline movement of MeetUp in the service of a sizable number of ambitious electoral and social justice goals:

• Fight poverty in their local communities; addressing important local needs through community organizing and service projects.
• Help elect local, state and federal candidates who support One America ideals, and who are fighting for all Americans.
• Register new voters for this November's election.
• Assist with important statewide ballot initiatives, like those seeking to raise the minimum wage in AZ, CO, MO, MT, NV, and OH.
• And, spread the message of One America by writing letters to the editor, calling local radio stations, talking with other members of their communities at events and meetings, and recruiting new members to the One Corps community.

It is by now a matter of conventional wisdom that, more so than our parents’ generation, Millenials are a community-oriented generation of volunteers. More and more, we are producers of information as much as we are consumers, and we are looking to participate in the lives of our communities. As Robert Putnam has reported (pdf), we are the only generation whose level of community service and participation has maintained an increase since 9/11. So while I don’t consider One Corps to be a replacement for a dedicated youth outreach, its focus on giving back to the community and working locally on a range of issues that cross the line between strict electoral politics and opportunities with a more social justice flavor is clearly something that could attract younger voters.

If constructed properly, One Corps could accommodate the coordination needs of the youth arm of a presidential campaign. In both form and content it has the potential to attract a large pool of Millenial voters. It doesn’t hurt that the One America Committee already promotes One Corps on MySpace. To emphasize the point, though, when Senator Edwards begins to ramp up a dedicated youth outreach program, he will need to create a broader strategy that taps multiple social networks – including niche networks targeting more specific subcultures – and devise a way to integrate that work with One Corps. This coordinated strategy will need to give young supporters their own networked community with within the larger realm of Edwards supporters and One Corps chapters.

That said, let’s dig in and see what One Corps is all about. As in my last review, I’ll tackle One Corps section by section noting what is good, what’s bad, and what is missing.

As the Democratic presidential primary begins, candidate websites are coming online. Politicians are starting to take notice of young voters, and some are starting to build a base among millenials. With that added attention comes new programs – many of which attempt to leverage social networks and new technologies to reach out to the millennial generation.

As these programs and websites launch, I'm going begin writing reviews of these efforts. These will be honest critiques of both design and program aspects of the candidates' youth outreach efforts. They are not intended to be mean-spirited or snarky swipes at politicians who don't get it. I hope that these will be read more as strategy memos meant to help candidates increase their support among young voters. I don't really have a horse in the race yet, so my biases are small and I hope to keep them out of these reviews. At the end of the day, it's all about increasing the ability of Democrats to engage Millennial.

First up in this series is Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who this week launched YouthRoots, the youth arm of his Forward Together PAC.

The website basically consists of four chunks: Video/Feature Content, Sign-up/Action, Testimonials, Links. I'll tackle each chunk separately, providing review of what's good, what's bad, and what's missing.