Facebook

Facebook has just released their new Lexicon tool, which allows you too look at statistics based on what Facebook users are writing on profile walls.

Currently the tool is in a test version that only has about 20 different topics to see data for, though once it is officially rolled out you will be able to search for data with any keyword.

Fortunately for those of us in the political realm, many of the provided keywords are political: McCain, Obama, Biden, Palin, Democrats, Republicans, and politics.

Here are some of the main features of the new Lexicon.

Dashboard

The dashboard allows you to look at the number and percentages of posters and posts. Above is the dashboard for Obama. You can see that on the bottom it breaks down the posters into age and gender demographics. Unfortunately this data is raw and not weighted, so the data seems to always resemble Facebook's demographics as a whole.

Demographics

The demographics tab will allow you to see graphs of the age and gender data. Once again the fact that you can't weigh the data diminishes a lot of its potential utility.

Associations

The associations tab shows you what other terms people use in the same wall post as the keyword. This is represented graphically using circles on an XY plot. The size of the circle represents the number of posts that included the associated keyword. The X-axis indicates whether more males or females use the two keywords together more frequently, with male being to the right and female to the left. The Y-axis shows the average age of the user making the association. I think this feature may become one of the more useful of the set, but the unweighted age data affects this as well.

Sentiment

The sentiment tab shows how often the keyword is in positive or negative contexts. The algorithm/dictionary they are using for this isn't public, so I'm not sure on the specifics of how they determine the score. It is important to note that there are a lot of false positives and negatives using these algorithms. They can't determine sarcasm, so if I posted "Yeah, McCain is exactly what we need to fix the economy" sarcastically on a friend's wall, it would probably show up as positive sentiment. That being said, you are still able to get a good general idea of sentiment by looking at the trend lines. In the screen shot above you can see the compared sentiment scores for Obama and McCain over the last 14 days.

Pulse

The pulse tab shows keywords that frequently occur in the profiles of users who mentioned the topic. You can see raw numbers for interests, music, movies, TV, and books. This is definitely more useful for commercial marketers than political people, and once again raw data means that something like Harry Potter is going to be at the top of all the book lists because of its ubiquity.

Map

The map tab shows where people are talking about the selected topic(s) and allows you to compare relative popularity. Each state is colored based on how many times the topic was mentioned relative to the other topic. In the screen shot above I compared Obama and McCain. In this case Obama is mentioned more than McCain in every state. If a state mentioned McCain more than Obama it would be a shade of red.

Final Thoughts

The Facebook Lexicon might be useful for some national campaigns in the future once it opens up to all keywords, but there are some things holding it back.

As I mentioned a bunch of times before, the fact that you can't weigh data is a big weakness. What I would like to see would be to compare the data relationship to the averages of Facebook users in the United States. For example, if 50% of Facebook users have Harry Potter as a favorite book on their profile, but 58% of posters of a keyword have it listed, show the data as +8%. Conversely if only 46% listed it, show -4%. This would allow you to get a better picture of the data relationship than the raw data does.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the Lexicon only uses data from wall posts. This does not take into account status updates. I am not yet sure whether or not the final version will include comments on items in your news feed,

What are your thoughts on the Facebook Lexicon? Do you think it may be useful in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments.

In case you missed it . . .

• A loophole in Ohio voting law that will allow for one-stop registration and voting this fall could be a huge boon to Obama (and young voters) in the state.
• Yesterday activists launched a campaign on Facebook against Evan Bayh as the potential VP pick called 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh. You would already know this if you were friends with Future Majority on Facebook.
• Huckabee youth group "Huck's Army" is now recruiting for McCain.
• Future Majority friend, activist, and videographer "noneck" Noel Hidalgo was deported from China this week for filming protests in Tiananmen Square. Noel and his crew might be following me around during the DNC convention producing video for FM. Let's hope it doesn't get quite so dicey in Denver.
• Jared Polis won his primary in Colorado and will go on to become the next Democratic congressman in his district. Not only that, he is the first openly gay candidate elected to congress and he may well be one of - if not the - youngest congressman in the country. I'm proud to have had Jared as a guest in our live blog series. Congrats to him and everyone who worked on the campaign.
• I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but in the next few days, Barack Obama will announce his VP nominee via text message. This was a great idea on their part. They probably received thousands of cell phone numbers that can now be used to get out the vote in November via text.
• The New York Times has more on that in Garret Graff's op-ed about text messaging in the Presidential campaign.
• Blender asked the candidates about their favorite songs. John McCain - what happened to Usher? I thought he was your favorite artist?
• The Washington Post has the skinny on the hottest parties at the DNC.
• In Nevada, a 22 year old is running against an incumbent state Senator who has held office since 14 years before his challenger was born.
• The Wall Street Journal finally picked up on James Fowler's study of the Colbert Bump.
• Generation Vote has a put together a Youth policy platform.
• The Post Chronicle has some thoughts about what Obama's youth supporters need to do post-election day.
• Tom Friedman actually wrote a decent piece about McCain's energy policy.
• It's Getting Hot in Here explains the whole "Gang of 10" energy compromise and why it's a win for Obama.
• David Burstein of 18 in '08 explains the significance of just one vote.
• Medill reports that this may be the geekiest of all conventions.
• Wow:

• Speak of the Devil. Just a few days after I posted about MTV airing attack ads on Obama, MoveOn counters with their own positive ad on the network. It's awesome that they're countering so quickly, but truth be told, I'm not at all wowed by the ad and found it pretty easy to tune out. Judge for yourself and let me know what you think:
• Wiretap has the lowdown on a panel on the youth vote organized by the good people at S.A.V.E. Tom Friedman was on the panel, apparently making only slightly less of an ass out of himself. Dispatch Politics has more.
• The Miami Herald profiles Party Politics, a Drinking Liberally style company down in Florida that is engaging young people at nightclubs using open-bar mixers.
• The Chronicle of Higher Educaction throws some legitimate cold water on Obama mania and what it means for long-term civic engagement.
• Fox News reveals that McCain has youth chairs in 30 states. Here's my question: what the hell are they all doing?
• Just how much of your salary each year goes to Iraq? Progressive Future has a new widget that will tell you, along with what else that money could have bought.
• Non profits in New Mexico are fighting back against harsh election laws that restrict their work and discourage voter registration.
• The Hip Hop Caucus is launching a voter registration drive.
• The National Hip Hop Political Convention is this week in Las Vegas. I'm working on getting someone to live blog. Hopefully that will work out.
• Broadband penetration will hit 77% by 2012. So long digital divide . . .
• The GOP now has an Obama smear site set up to look like Facebook. It might be clever if People for the American Way hadn't already done the same thing to the GOP primary candidates almost a year ago.

Over on my blog I just posted about Facebook's new phonebook feature. Phonebook is exactly what it sounds like: an alphabetically organized list of the phone numbers of all of your Facebook friends that list them. Check it out if you are interested.

My apologies for this blog being a little short. I'm at a training thing today - promise to make it up with something more substantial over the weekend!

Kevin has talked about YDA's Pledge to Vote campaign in reflecting on the Peer-to-peer network that is created. There are also a number of similar organizations that are partnering in this effort.

You heard Mike give props to a great registration drive at Bonnaroo with HeadCount where they got 2,000 people to pledge to vote. The Youth Voter Collective is doing a pledge to vote campaign heck even Oprah has a pledge to vote operation, The Human Rights Campaign has also launched a Pledge to Vote campaign, as the famous social justice advocacy group headed by Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners has launched a Vote out Poverty campaign asking people to pledge to vote.

But this week Rock the Vote announced their version of it with the Rock the Vote Application on Facebook (must be signed in). This enables folks, in true Facebook Application style, to invite people to join in via FB. This translates to a fantastic GOTV operation where people will get harassed on Facebook (I mean that in a good way).

I'm curious if this application harvests email addresses and personal contact information. I'm thinking that they will send you notes on facebook, potentially text you, and if you say its cool they'll send you emails as well. Which... hey, if you can get your friends to do it, could prove to be significantly helpful.

Also on Facebook, is the Election 2008 Event, that I've seen for the last several months. Someone set up an event and they are trying to get people to say that they are attending the election (aka voting). Such an awesome idea! This too will remind you when the date gets closer! So far 628,035 confirmed guests... damn... If all of those people turn out, plus the people who aren't on facebook, we'll have a nice generational impact. Go team!

I'm heading out shortly to tape for GritTV with Laura Flanders. We're doing a one-hour panel on the youth vote and a half-hour segment on Youth to Power. Be back online this afternoon.

• At Campus Politico, Ben Adler notes that summer break is putting a crimp in plans to register and organize students.
• At AlterNet, Courtney Martin talks about growing up a Millennial and how race and gender play differently on the campaign trail for younger voters.
• Republicans have a new blog dedicated to reaching "Generation Next" online. It involves crayons.
• Salon notes rising youth turnout, and while they are still skeptical, admit that young voters could be a factor in November.
• Barack Obama has 1 million supporters on Facebook.
• The "American Dream" as our parents knew it is dead, argues Anya Kamenetz, but she's got some suggestions on what a new American Dream might look like. Long live the American Dream!

I spent this last weekend doing trainings for Arizona high school students who are interested in starting Young Democrats chapters at their schools. In a little experiment, we confirmed that by calling the people that RSVPed as attending or maybe attending to our Facebook event we dramatically increased turnout.

A lot of organizations utilize Facebook events, yet not enough take the second step of confirming attendees using alternative online and offline methods. It is a common practice to calculate a significant "Facebook dropoff" when determining how many people will actually come to your event. If 50 people signed up to attend, you expect 20-25 to actually show up. Instead of taking this as an inherent characteristic of Facebook events, a little extra effort will bring you much closer to the actual number of people that RSVPed.

The day before your event, have a couple of people go through the list of confirmations and maybes and call through it. Many of the people that you invited to the event will be people that you know personally and have contact information for, so contacting them will be easy. For those that you do not know personally, go to their Facebook profile and find their contact information there. Many people put their cell phone numbers and/or IM names on their profile. You can also see if those people share any friends with you. If they do, ask one of your mutual friends to call them or to share their contact information with you. If your organization has voter file access you could also look them up there if you are having a hard time contacting them.

Following up with RSVPs with phone calls and instant messages will not only increase turnout to your event, but will also give you a much more accurate count in determining attendance in advance.

What methods have you or your organization used to increase turnout for events listed on Facebook? Share in the comments.

Still no word on data from CIRCLE . . . sorry. Waiting on them for my post-election recap.

• Rolling Stone skewers the Senate in The Senate Caves.
• Peter Levine - Director of CIRCLE - splashes some cold water on the idea that party identification forms early and hardens for life. Yikes, let's hope not.
• In the past I've had real disagreements with Courtney Martin's reading of today's youth activism, but she does us all proud in this op-ed for the Women's Media Center.
• The RNC tried to pull ahead of the DNC in the race for Facebook friends. It backfired hilariously. Full story at Tech President.
• Campaigns and Elections has released a list of Rising Stars Under 35. A few are familiar. Most are not. What do you think of the list?
• Apparently, in his quest to craft a "better" GI Bill than the one offered (and recently passed) by Jim Webb, John McCain didn't actually consult many veterans. You stay classy, McCain.

Colin Delany of ePolitics has an interesting article posted today: Has Facebook Jumped the Shark as a Political Tool?

His determination? When it comes to functioning as a mass communications tool or living up to the media hype - Yes. When it comes to building community and fostering group formation through one-on-one conversation - No, assuming you do it properly.

Facebook is a useful tool, but it's not the new killer-app, at least when it comes to political campaigns. Email, online fundraising, and online video still wield far more influence and the best uses of Facebook come when it can integrate into one of those other functions. In the end, it seems to be all about expectations and execution. Delaney's article is a good read on that account, and even comes with a few handy best practices that all online campaign operatives should keep in mind.

• At 9pm Eastern tonight I'll be blogging at Daily Kos as part of the weekly Kossacks Under 35 series. I'll be blogging about the three new books reporting on the youth vote this year.
• The CT legislature passed a law allowing 17 year olds the right to vote in a primary if they will turn 18 by the general election. - Rock the Vote
• Nancy Scola explores the brief history of Facebook's role as a social change agent, both the good and the bad. -AlterNet
• Micah Sifry doubts allegations that the Clinton campaign raise $10 million in 24 hours this week. - TechPresident
• Republicans in Arizona are looking to ban ethnic student groups and associations. - DailyKos
• Ben Adler reports that Obama lost young white voters to Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania. - Campus Politico
• The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a brief look at the Harvard IOP survey results. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• The Arcade Fire and Superchunk are playing at ealry get out the vote rallies in support of Sen. Obama in North Carolina. - Merge Records
• Voto Latino discovers that Jenna Bush may not vote for John McCain, but then again, she doesn't really pay attention to politics anyway. Awesome. Way to be a role model Jenna. - Voto Latino