metrics

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.

In response to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the changing narrative around young voters, I received a call from Ivan Frishberg, who sits on the board of Young Voter PAC and the advisory board of CIRCLE. Ivan wrote to me to both confirm and elaborate on my thesis: that the media narrative surrounding young voters has changed and is reaching a potential tipping point this November. In our conversation, he painted an enlightening picture as to how and why the media misreported youth turnout in 2004, and why that narrative is finally changing.

In Ivan’s recounting of the 2004 election, it begins with a strategic plan executed by a coalition that included the New Voters Project and the Youth Vote Coalition. This plan had two goals:

1. Get campaigns to realize the importance of young voters and, consequently, spend a more proportionate share of their campaign warchest to reach young voters; and
2. Improve media coverage of young voters.

The cornerstone of this strategy was the accumulation of reliable data about field work aimed at young voters. Metrics.
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By now there is a standard story about social networks and politics. It goes something like "Young people congregate on MySpace and other social networks. If politicians want to tap the power of the youth vote that emerged in '04, they need a presence on these networks. This is starting to happen, and FaceBook and MySpace administrators are actively facilitating it."

But who really is on social networks? A new study suggests that social networking isn't just for young people. In fact, it's mostly for folks over 24.

Clearly social networks aren't just a young person's game anymore. These numbers are a little misleading since the four sites receive radically different traffic numbers. 10% on MySpapce isn't all that different from 30 or 40% on Friendster or even more on Xanga when you are talking real numbers. But it helps to know who, exactly, you are talking to when you create a candidate page on a given network.

The big surprise to me is that 40% of MySpace users are over 35. That's a huge number. Do they use MySpace the same way that younger people do? Could MySpace be a viable tactic for campaigns to reach that demographic? What happens when you have to reach more than one demographic on a given social network? Do your messages get channelled to the lowest common denominator and become bland like the rest of the campaign media - negating the personality that could help the candidate appeal to specific audiences?

At this point, I don't think that campaigns alter the focus of their work on social networks to cater to older demographics, but it will be interesting to see what happens when CIRCLE of the New Politics Institute report on campaign use of these tools. Will we find that these really were good vehicles to engage young people? Or will we see that the vast majority of MySpacers who actually did something for the campaign were the older voters who also happened to use social networks? Of course, this all also presupposes that campagns actually run effectiv programs through these social networks. Failurue to engage young people could just as easily result from a slew of bad campaign strategies.