social networks

With the new information out about Facebook allowing data and access to it's users for advertisers and the new and improved privacy settings, the recent Pew Survey about youth attitudes toward privacy couldn't be more timely.

"Some 71 percent of social networking users aged 18 to 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online"

This compares to just 55 percent of users who are 50 to 64. I'm sure there's a crack I could make here about it being because they just haven't signed on in six months...

Further

"44 percent of young adult Web users limit the amount of personal info available about themselves online."

I frequently hear reporters talk about the accessibility of information on individuals who are members of the Millennial Generation. Whether naughty photos on facebook or drunken tweets, the talking point has been that young people are free and open to exposure. I think these numbers show that while young people are open to accessibility to some extent, they have a larger amount of control over the information that they are giving than perhaps previously assumed.

After all - one doesn't have to fill out the entire facebook profile page, right?

"Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities," Madden wrote in her May 26 report."

I had a conversation with a guy at an event last week who wondered what election cycle we'd start to see photos from facebook and twitter from their college days or high school being used against them as they're running for office. More specifically when we would begin to see photos surface or "controversial" tweets that suddenly became part of the standard for opposition research and used in campaign commercials.

I think we've started seeing some of that with campaigns that try to go after staffers of candidates. We've see Obama staffer photos from facebook and incoming White House staffers back in 2008 were asked to provide their facebook links and answer questions about any embarrassing emails they might have sent.

I think this is probably up to begin in the next 5-10 years but it might be 15 before we see it at the Presidential level. But my spin to the guy I was talking to was that our generation is accustom to the concept of accessibility to information about ourselves and the increased lack of privacy. As the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers begin to die off and Millennials take the lead in the electorate, I predict we'll see a rejection of this kind of information to be a valid form of attack against a candidate.

With such a huge majority of young people on social networking sites there is surly a deeper level of understanding and solidarity with tagged photos and profanity in tweets among Millennials. I can't imagine that in the Millennial Congress politicians will be able to get very far using this for attacks. There will probably be a period of transition where shocking things will surface and older generations will naturally be aghast and horrified - but realistically they weren't voting for a progressive candidate anyway.

What is interesting is the level of privacy control that youth seem to have over their own data. Meaning - as long as they are the ones posting the embarrassing photo it's fine, but Facebook better not allow advertisers to find my demographic info for the purposes of market research and targeting. For that - 71% alter their settings on the site. As long as there is a possibility of control, users all seem to be cool on the facebook front.

With these new settings and concerns I found this fancy Top 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know guide. I will make a plea, however, please, don't think your facebook and twitter pages disqualify you for seeking higher office. We need more young candidates, not less.

Yesterday on Mashable there was an article titled "Why Social Media Means Big Opportunities for Women". The article brings up some very compelling points as to why social media is opening more doors for women in many ways.

Women have firmly established their presence on the social web, and account for the majority of users on many popular social media sites. But what does this mean for the future of women in social media?

One word: Opportunity.

Companies looking to reach women — whether as consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, or advocates — have an unprecedented opportunity through social media to engage them. For women, social media presents abundant opportunities to lead, effect change, innovate, and build relationships across sectors, locally, nationally, and globally.

Not to take away from the point being made but I believe the arguments provided can apply to youth in general. The article argues that companies, through the usage of social media, are gathering real time feedback from female consumers about products, ideas, marketing, etc. Companies are starting to use social media to do their product testing and aiming directly at women (and youth).

Conversations between companies and female consumers are moving beyond “what do you want?” types of questions. Companies are starting to use social media to secure real-time feedback from women on products, services, and marketing campaigns—sometimes before they go to market.

Unilever used social media to launch their new Pond’s Age Miracle moisturizer in China, recruiting bloggers to try the product and share their findings. The strategy was risky because of the heavy usage of social media there, but it came with a huge upside: If the bloggers liked the product, word of mouth could lead to major success. If not, the poor publicity from blogs would make the launch difficult to salvage. The risk paid off and the moisturizer was a hit, leading to the adoption of social media strategies by other Unilever offices in Asia.

If companies use targeting like Unilever did they can be just as successful, regardless if they are targeting and gathering feedback from women or youth. However women are dominating the usage of social media sites, and they are gaining the lead in mobile web usage too.

A significant opportunity exists for companies to connect with women using mobile technologies. Women comprise 47% of current mobile web users, and between 2008 and 2009, the number of women using the mobile web increased by 43%, compared with a 26% increase in the number of men.

While women's influence is growing in the world of social networking and technology the article does provide some insight to where it isn't exactly the most inclusive.

not all conferences are women-friendly. At some, sexualized images of women are still included in presentations. Others feature scantily clad women as props or for entertainment. Stone, Page, and Jardins observed that “the organizers of many conferences, especially tech conferences, don’t seem to appreciate that women don’t want to sit through presentations — PowerPoint, video and otherwise — that depict women as porn stars and/or sex objects.”

However there is optimism that it will change, as women continue to become even more influential in the world of social media we will hopefully see a move that way.

The number of women programmers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, consultants, community managers, and social media users continues to grow. It’s only a matter of time before these numbers translate into greater visibility and influence in the social space.

Trapani, too, is optimistic: “Ladies, now is not the time to be timid. Step up, take chances, push yourself beyond your comfort zone, use your powers and influence for good, and let your expertise shine.”

A listserv I'm on has had a very interesting thread about Tweeting recently beginning with a piece from Politico that says more GOP electeds are on Twitter than are Democratic Elected Officials almost 2:1 - 100 to 56 according to Tweet Congress.

"A total of 261 Dems are ignoring the new technology (Claire McCaskill ain't one 'em) compared to 119 non-Tweet R's."

This broke into a discussion that questioned the demographic of Twitter and its usefulness to the political youth movement as well as its effectiveness for advocacy and/or outreach.

According to the Nielson Wire

"Twitter’s footprint has expanded impressively in the first half of 2009, reaching 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June. Perhaps even more impressively, this growth has come despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults. In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent."

What Jason Pollock from The Youngest Candidate remarked was that early adoptors of Twitter were already middle aged, where early adopters of Facebook and MySpace were in their teens and 20's. Twitter was more of a technology phenomenon when I began using it, but it has grown from there to become more of the social network people see it as today.

The major focus for me has been with search engine optimization. You hear this thrown around a lot but, essentially it means that the more sites you promote your blog posts to, the more ways people are able to find it, and the higher it will climb in a google search.

My example to the list was something we orchestrated earlier this year during the Kansas Legislative Session. A number of my friends were early Twitter adopters, and have talked it up so significantly that everyone we know is now on Twitter, creating a predominantly progressive following on the site in Kansas. So while nationally there might be more GOP elected officials on Twitter than democrats, in our state, progressives dominate the pool and use it constantly to promote progressive blogs and bloggers, causes, and candidates, while also waging major hits online to GOP electeds at the federal and state level.

We suffer from a profound lack of transparency in our state Capitol. There are no video or recording devices allowed inside the chamber or committee rooms. If you want audio you have to go get the day's tape and search for the quote you want. Then basically put the audio into a video that just features the member's photo. It sucks. But, this past session we had progressive lobbyists and bloggers live tweeting the legislature and committees with our offensive network of retweeters prepared to spread the word.

Early in the session then Governor Kathleen Sebelius (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) had proposed solutions to the budget difficulties Kansas, like many other states, was having. The GOP lead legislature wasn't interested in pushing the Governor's plan and as such threatened to shut down the government. We knew there was going to be a throw-down throughout the day and had primed our group to be prepared to Tweet and drive traffic all day about how the GOP didn't care about regular people in Kansas.

It began early with a few blog posts on Kansas Jackass , and a clever name PayCheck Gate. Then the tweet storm began. For a few hours we tweeted and encouraged other to do so about the controversy, we encouraged people to call elected officials, we crossposted blogs, and everything had the tag #ksgop.

People made fun of us, asking why we were promoting progressive values like getting paid all while labeling it with KSGOP? It seemed silly. Until about three o'clock that afternoon when a google search for KSGOP reveled our blogs as the #1 search. Second, was the thread on search.twitter.com for our hashtag, and third was the KSGOP's website, which by the way, is www.ksgop.com.

So, while I agree that there are limits and flaws to organizing with Twitter, you can build a powerful social media advocacy movement that young people can participate in via smart phones and sometimes while at work or in class. Further, it doesn't require youth to give money, write a letter or email, or make a call. You can create the movement, activate it, then do a process story about it followed by fundraising around it's success. You can use it to tear down and build up, depending on your agenda or your org's strategy and goals.

Best Practices

Many of you have heard me say that my real job at Mixed Media is to just cause trouble on the internet all day. But its something everyone can learn, develop, and foster if they have the time and energy to do so.

My suggestion, particularly to those organizations or campaigns working in the states or in specific cities that are smaller (like Atlanta vs Chicago and NYC) is to do a workshop for your members on Twitter. Show them the practical applications, how they can use it to help, and network them in with your movement. Use it to promote small things first like blogs or news pieces. Watch via search.twitter.com or BackTweets how the branches of the tree work, if it's not working build your base with more workshops, or consider doing blast emails or facebook messages asking folks to RT @Whoever or change their status update.

Your result will be a following much more powerful than someone who has 40,000 friends - it will be hundreds of people that will retweet and advocate for your causes.

You can build local and regional movements quickly and easily then use them to promote your organization, have friends help cultivate small donors, promote online outreach, and give your members some form of consistent participation that they feel is meaningful without having to donate money all the time.

Twitter - USE IT! If you ever have any questions feel free to email me - my information is on the about page.

I have been spending a lot of time working with Facebook Pages recently, and I wanted to share some best practices that I have picked up.

Status Updates

Status updates are the bread and butter of Facebook Pages. They are your primary source of communication and through likes and comments the primary source of interaction by your fans. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your updates:

• Update Frequently - But not too frequently. You want to find that happy medium where your fans are engaged but not turned off. Your updates will appear in your fans' home feeds, so you should provide content that will be of interest to them. You want your page to be active, since it in turn reflects on the activity of your organization, but you don't want to appear spammy.
• Be Personal - When I post an update to the Young Democrats of America page, I include my name before the update. People prefer to know with whom they are communicating, and unless you identify yourself in your update it will feel impersonal.
• Ask Questions, Encourage Interaction - Your Facebook Page shouldn't be a one-way communications tool. Fans have the opportunity to communicate with you and with each other. Asking questions encourages your fans to comment on your updates, which elicits a feeling of participation as well as boosting the exposure of your page (updates that receive a lot of interaction appear on the homepage sidebar). It also provides you with an opportunity to learn more about your fans.
• Share - You shouldn't solely post updates based on your own content. If you see a news article that would be interesting and relevant to your fans, share it. If an allied organization is doing something impressive, let your fans know.
• Promote and Recognize Members/Chapters - If one of your members or chapters is doing something interesting, received press coverage, or wrote a great article, share it with your fans. People like to know what other members and chapters are doing, and your members/chapters that you mention will appreciate the recognition.
• Don't Update Using Twitter - While Facebook Page status updates and tweets seem like similar media, there are differences between the two, and using a one-size-fits-all approach will not be as effective. Though you may end up sending the same update to both sometimes, it should be a case-by-case decision.

Content

Status updates aren't your only communications tool on your page. Here are some tips for other types of content:

• Blog Syndication - If your organization has a blog or website with an RSS feed you should import the posts into your page using Facebook notes. This will increase the reach of your blog content and help drive your fans to your website.
• Multimedia - You can share photos and videos on your Facebook page, and often this content generates the most response from fans. Post multimedia content from events, rallies, campaign videos and photo galleries, etc.
• Help Fans Connect to You - You should make it easy for your fans to connect to you on different platforms through your page. Occasionally share your website, Twitter account, YouTube or Flickr accounts, etc. You want your fans to be as engaged in your organization as possible.

Insights

Insights is the built-in analytics tool for your Facebook page. It is important to keep track of the statistics of your page and fans in order to chart your progress in growth and engagement.

Through Insights you can see how many new fans you have added each day compared to the number of fans that have removed themselves, which is a good way to measure whether you are posting too frequently or not enough. You can also see how engaged your fans are with your content.

Another useful feature is the ability to look at the demographic of your fan base by age, gender, and location.

Conclusions

Your Facebook Page can be an extremely useful communications and engagement tool if used effectively. Hopefully these tips will help you improve your results. If you have any of your own best practices for Facebook Pages, please share them in the comments.

P.S. I still need your support in the DFA Netroots Nation Scholarship Competition, so if you could send a vote my way I would appreciate it.

In an outstanding example of the use of online technology and social media, the Lawrence Journal World did a twitter-view with Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew about the way his office is using social media as a way to do better outreach.

Last week I emphasized the need for accessibility through technology for the Kansas State House and Senate, but the Douglas County Clerk was well on his way of advocating for greater outreach through social media as early as last year when he first began tweeting.

Now the, somewhat young, elected official is using the new world of technology in attempts to get more young people in Lawrence (home of the University of Kansas) to vote in the upcoming city elections.

"Recently, he and his staff members have started posting messages on Twitter reminding Douglas County voters that advance voting was open this week at the courthouse, 1100 Mass.

“Social media seems to be able to spread messages quickly across multiple domains,” Shew said.

His office also has been looking at ways to expand its communication reach, especially when his budget is limited.

“Governments have to start thinking outside the bricks and mortar of the courthouse to create contact points in the new information age,” he said."

I know of no previous twitter-views but I have to say this must be one of the first. Shew goes further to talk about his outreach through a full on interview back and forth between the LJWorld and Shew.

Most Notable:

"@dgcokselections: It is an additional tool for outreach, especially for mobilization of new generations of voters who communicate via social media.

@dgcokselections: It has been gradual as we test which venues are appropriate. Using Twitter to share info that is broadcast in more traditional methods.

@dgcokselections: We are really interested in developing a full scale approach by the 2010 elections when social media will have expanded even more.

@dgcokselections: This has been in conjunction with our expanded use of the Web site to get information out to the public like online sample ballots."

I applaud any elected official who is using new technologies to reach out to young people, indeed all constituents, in their district. It does us all a disservice when we can't connect with our elected members, but with further outreach on sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook we all have a stronger connection to government. In the end it will grow civic engagement and hopefully civic pride.

New Pew study is out about social networking sites. This time it looks at the connectivity to SN's by age specifically examining the ways in which older folks are using SN's.

Pew writes, young people are much more likely than older adults to use social networks, shocker... But these numbers will of course evolve as Millennials grow older and seniors move along...

"Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.

When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile. "

No word yet on if there is an iPhone app for that....

As a friend noted the people who were still in college when Facebook was invented are in the 18-24 pile right now for the most part, but will pretty quickly be making the jump to the next age group, where they’ll linger for ten years.

• 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile
• 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile
• 30% of online adults 35-44 have a profile
• 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile
• 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile
• 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile

Networks adults are using:

• 50% of adult social network users have a profile on MySpace
• 22% have a profile on Facebook
• 6% have a profile on LinkedIn

They also saw that social networks are evenly spread among women and men but a friend also noted that she saw in another report that women are more likely to share content on social networks than men, whereas men were more likely than women to share content on blogs.

I'm still making my way through Danah Boyd's final doctoral thesis that according to the abstract

"documents [her] 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices—self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society."

I'm making lots of notes for a future post that can condense it into a blog (is there an iPhone app for that?), but I highly recommend reading the full dissertation which you can find at her website www.danah.org.

Tomorrow young voters across the country have the chance to be the margin of victory for Sen. Barack Obama and Democrats up-and-down the ballot.

Tomorrow our generation has the chance to silence the critics that have been promulgating the slander that young people do not care, will not vote, and are not worth the effort.

We have one more day to convince our friends to vote. It is time to leverage our social networks to make this final push.

In 2004 the Young Democrats of America had a lot of success building online visibility with the equivalent of a digital I Voted Today sticker as a profile picture. This year we have another. Change your Facebook and MySpace profile pictures to the image in this post. Tag your friends in the picture and encourage them to do the same.

You have friends on social networking sites that would vote for Democrats but just need that extra push to get them to the polls. Send messages to these friends. Leave comments on their profiles. Ask them if they have any questions or need a ride to the polls. If you can get them to assure you they will vote they are much more likely to do so.

John McCain and his fellow Republicans don't want you to vote and don't think you will vote. McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis had this to say about us:

"The whole premise of Barack Obama's campaign was, 'We're going to restructure the political dynamic in America.' There has not been a restructuring," he said. "Where's the youth vote? They come to his events. They wear nice shirts."

We are up against a campaign and a party that have no respect for our generation. They want our silence, not our voices, and have often engaged in tactics with the intent of suppressing them.

Tomorrow we can make our voices heard.

One more day.

• The New York Times reports that 6,400 voters in Colorado may be disenfrachised thanks to dishonest trainings and misinformation distributed by the Republican Secretary of State's office. Our friends at New Era Colorado are featured prominently in the piece fighting back against the disenfranchisement.
• The Obama campaign raked in the cash in September, pulling in more than $150 million. If you missed it, campaign manager David Plouffe noted that Students were one of the top donors to the campaign, along with retirees.
• For some reason, I've never seen this before. Check out YDA's Young Voter Revolution. Take the pledge and check out the tools and resources.
• The Wall Street Journal business and technology blog looks at some data from Rapleaf and says that different swing states favor different social networks. For instance, Wisconsin youth favor Bebo, while Virginians favor Black Planet and New Mexican youth are on Hi5. This bears more looking into.
• The National Review commissioned a hit piece on Campus Progress. Over at Pushback, Jesse Singal ably rips NR's piece to shreds.
• Zack has an awesome idea to make FaceBook an even greater peer pressure machine to encourage voter turnout and political discussion.
• Skaters in Wasilla fought Sarah Palin and won.
• The LA Times has a rundown on celebrity PSA campaigns.
• Meanwhile, Visible Measures tries to measure the impact of those viral videos to Get Out the Vote. The site looks at which of 4 major GOTV PSAs has the most views, and finds that Leo DiCaprio's celebrity-studded "Don't Vote" video comes out on top.
• The Hill looks at the campaign's presence online and finds Obama ahead, but McCain catching up.
• Are your parents pestering you about ACORN and "voter fraud?" Send them this article from the election law blog.
• Mashable! tries to show a correlation between online activity on FaceBook and offline events in swing states, but doesn't do that convincing a job of it.
• In The Nation, Cora Courrier asks if youth will finally swing the election.
• Finally, a little music to start your day:

Last Monday, Kevin posted an interesting piece on the technology divide between Millennials, and GenX/Boomers in which he surmised that Millennials do not blog as a form of political expression to the same degree as Boomers/Xers because they are enmeshed in geographically tighter social circles that allow for daily, peer-to-peer political expression (presumably in the form of face to face conversations, instant messaging, and link sharing/wall posts on social networks).

In the comments, I wondered if the more "activist" Millennials would age into the blogosphere as their work required more deliberative formats than could be provided by link sharing on social networks and 160 character messages on Twitter. As it happens, Colin Delaney of ePolitics, in his continuing efforts to rescue the ever-maligned importance of email, pointed to a lecture by Vint Cerf positing a somewhat similar argument:

In a presentation I attended with a group of friends from the online politics crowd at The Cosmos Club on Monday, internet pioneer/Google “Technology Evangelist” (and future U.S. CTO?) Vint Cerf happened to make the issue snap into focus: while answering a question from the audience, he mentioned that he expected today’s young people to change their behavior as they age because they’ll be maintaining different kinds of relationships then than they do now. In high school and college, young people are usually communicating with peers who are nearby and living lives with similar patterns, but as they all move into adulthood, their lives will scatter and diverge in ways that often make delayed/deferred communications more useful than immediate communications. In other words, IM’ing is great when you’re gossipping with classmates, but email may be better when you’re catching up with that friend across the country who suddenly has three kids under the age of five.

That caught it in a powerfully simple and straightforward way: one of email’s strengths is that it IS asynchronous — that it ISN’T necessarily immediate, since you can read that email instantly or a week later. Of course, the same applies to messaging via Facebook or MySpace, but here’s where my personal bias connects with Cerf’s observation: I’ll submit that the thing that made Facebook messsaging useful (to me, at least) was when the “you have a message” notification emails began including the actual text someone was sending to you. Before that, when I had to click through to the Facebook site to see any message at all, I often didn’t bother. But since connecting email and Facebook (connecting Facebook to a common communications ground) made BOTH more effective, the change hasn’t led me to replace email completely with a proprietary messaging system — Facebook helps keep me in touch with people with whom I then email MORE.

Cerf's comments map nicely onto what Kevin and I were discussing. Cerf thinks that as Millennials age - and those geographically tight communities with high levels of leisure time disperse - that young people will gradually adopt more of the "old," deliberative technologies like email. It's not a big leap to think that similar patterns will be exhibited when it comes to political expression on the web. Changes in lifestyles and physical connection to social networks won't be the death of Twitter or Social Networks, but it will shift the balance in terms of how and how often they are used. If Cerf is right, then, as those geographic communities and similar life schedule disperse, Millennials would be expected to engage the blogosphere at rates similar to Boomers and Xers. Only time will tell.

I wonder if it's possible to make an analogous argument about Millennial activism and technology habits?

We've already seen that Millennials with low or average levels of political awareness/engagement can be motivated and moved to offline action via social networks and text messaging. That seems to be the preferred mode of "new" engagement this cycle, and that's exactly what happened in 2006 during the student immigration rallies - lots of people who were never particularly engaged held conversations and activated their social networks via MySpace and text messaging. We also saw this type of activism emerge from nowhere in late 2006 and early 2007 with the rise of 1 Million Strong for Barack Obama and the rise of Students for Barack Obama on Facebook.

Here's the thing, though. That kind of spontaneous activism is enabled by social media and can accomplish one-off goals, but in most instances it can't be sustained by social media to effect change over a long period of time. Today, there is nothing left from the student rallies driving comprehensive immigration reform. Such efforts can only be found in the nonprofit sector on on blogs like The Sanctuary and Citizen Orange. Students for Barack Obama quickly outgrew Facebook and set up their own website before merging with the Obama campaign. At some point, a limit is reached beyond which the effectiveness of the tools breaksdown for the task at hand.

Just a few days ago, Micah Sifry reported on the relaunch of Change.org, a website/activist hub that tried to use a social networking model to channel activism around a host of political issues. Despite garnering 120,000 users, Ben Rattray, the founder, calls the original model a failure. Now, he's retooling the site around a model that combined topical blogging on issues and a huge focus on SEO to make these blogs hubs of trusted information:

Josh adds, "I should be able to search 'human rights' and get more than static pages from nonprofits." And that's the second key part of their strategy: to win in search, they will offer a ton of dynamic, up-to-date content around key issues. Says Ben: "We want to aggregate and filter and provide context. If I care about human rights, what do I need to know, what’s going on in this space, and how do I connect to others. And the big difference is rather than have everything happen on Change.org, we want to point out to most compelling content on the web or the most useful actions. Rather than thinking of other sites as competitors, they’re our content. We want to be a media hub for social action."

That said, they are planning to do more than blog the news of the day on an issue, or list hundreds of available actions a motivated reader can take. Each of their topic bloggers will aim to provide real focus to readers. Ben says, "I don't want to see 8500 campaigns about global warming." And Josh adds, "The idea is to create trusted sources on each issue."

If this sounds a lot like what Jason Calacanis or Nick Denton might do if they cared about politics, that's no coincidence. Says Ben, "This is very much a Weblogs, Inc. strategy. I really want to own this space." He adds:

It seems like there is a limit beyond which social networks, twitter, and other forms of "immediate" media breakdown and become less useful or not useful. Beyond that limit, a more deliberative (and yes, at times top-down) technology needs to be deployed: email, blogging, central campaign structures, etc. The more I think of it, the more a "sliding scale" analogy is more appropriate. The point being, though, that one one side of the scale, among the less engaged, social networks and twitter, adn the information sharing they enable are perfectly suitable modes of political expression and engagement. On the other side, when long-term activism is the goal, they require other technologies to supplement them.

Bringing this back to the question of "how do Millennials participate" and "at what points do we see changes in that behavior," according to the 2006 Blog Ads survey, about 15% of political blog readers are under the age of 30 (aka, Millenials). If there is an "intensity gap" among Millennials in terms of how they engage in activism online - with higher intensity individuals on the blogs and less intense individuals staying on the social networks, then political blog readership among Millenials should increase as political activism among Millennials increases, right? In which case, with the huge surge in youth participation we've seen, we should also see a huge jump this year in blog readership among Millennials. Anecdotally, I know that is certainly true here at Future Majority. Our readership is up 267% for the year over 2007, and over 500% for the last 3 months over 2007. I wonder if other youth blogs like Pushback and It's Getting Hot in Here have seen similar growth patterns. Likewise for some of the bigger community sites such as Daily Kos, MyDD and Open Left.

This is all, of course, only scratching the surface of this issue. Time and data will tell us some answers (as will a 2008 Blog Ads reader survey . . . ). I expect this will be one of the larger questions we look at consistently over the next year, especially as it applies to motivating young people to action around specific policy proposals in Congress.

The Facebook Face Off

Sean Parker, founder of Facebook, and political and policy think-tanker, Bill Galston aired their views on the merits and drawbacks of the Internet Age. The face-off took place at the 2008 Annual National Conference on Citizenship, held Monday, September 22 in Washington, DC with political advisor, Joe Trippi acting as moderator.

With approximately 24% of Americans using the internet daily, the impact this medium has on civil discourse and social behavior is a discussion that couldn’t be more relevant. The discussion was originally framed around the premise “Can Facebook Replace Face-to-Face?” in regard to civic and political involvement. Parker began the discussion by defining Facebook as a gathering place for friends, not faceless strangers. While admitting that Facebook’s origins were somewhat “frivilous” and definitely entertainment based, Parker took the occasion to mention Facebook Causes, the socially conscious arm of the social networking site. It quickly became apparent that Parker and Galston did share common ground. Both men recognized the ability of the internet and social websites to build communities among strangers and to cement relationships among friends, but common ground turned to shaky ground when Galston lamented the lack of “gatekeepers” in the media – new and old media alike. Galston raised the question of whether America would be better off if we didn’t know every detail of the lives of our political representatives, citing Franklin Roosevelt’s long-time association with Lucy Mercer as case in point.

Just as things were really starting to roll, the session ended so look for more from Bill Galston and Sean Parker on this intriguing issue.