Promoted to front-page by David.

Social networks, or “socnets”, like MySpace and Facebook are attracting hoards of political candidates and activists alike. In fact, emerging from this trend are many online networks of political activists that seem to exist almost entirely in the realm of cyberspace. In the growing age of the Internet, a flashy namespace.com just doesn’t cut it for these activists. In the same token, just having a socnet (i.e. myspace.com/johnmccain) doesn’t seem to be enough anymore either.

First, it’s important to understand a few of the differences, both of purpose and applicaton, of the two biggest socnets. On the one hand, MySpace allows users to express their more of their personality, whether it’s through “skins” and “pimped out profiles” or the latest hit song blaring with that funny blooper video running the background. MySpace also has something that Facebook doesn’t (or at least not yet) – a built in blogging capability for profiles. On the other hand, Facebook is much more of a hybrid of content sharing (e.g. photos, links, videos, etc.) and social planning. Though MySpace has many of these same features—they aren’t as widely used as Facebook. Both sites allow a high degree of interactivity, in the form of profile and group comments, with varying levels of approval mechanisms.

Second, as alluded to earlier, it’s not just enough to now have an “online presence” outside of your namespace. But it takes time and resources to manage these sites. Someone has to be there to approve and add new friends on MySpace. And while Facebook makes this easier with an optional “open” setting, there are still messages (digital “fan mail”) to be answered.

Finally, savvy campaigns are getting wise to the huge potential of socnets. While Rudy still has his profile set to “private” on MySpace other GOP candidates like McCain and Ron Paul have attracted tens of thousands of friends. Of these two, strangely enough, Ron Paul seems to have a better strategy for involving these digital foot soldiers. They seemingly pop up everywhere. But behind the façade of the static MySpace page is an active group of supporters, hawking Ron Paul’s ideas and campaign all across the Internet.

To conclude, it is really incumbent on the eCampaign manager, or new media consultant, to develop strategies for getting these new cyber-activists involved (commonly referred to on the left as the “netroots”, or disparagingly “nutroots”). Perhaps the best advice that can be given is to treat these online ranks not as “passive” supporters, but active subscribers. You have to regularly interact with them, feed them content, and motivate them to champion your candidate in cyberspace.

But it’s not enough to just post YouTube clips, or occasional messages from your candidate in “bulletins” or blog posts. You have to give these people a purpose, and activate them. You have to think in terms of unleashing their potential. In this sense, a directive strategy may not be as effective as an emergent one. A lot of campaigns still operate on the notion that all politics are local. The great quality of cyberspace is that everything, no matter its true geographical distance, is local. So the next time you’re considering how to use a socnet, think to yourself, what would I use 30,000 volunteers for if they were standing in the parking lot outside of headquarters.
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