This past weekend at RightOnline in Austin, Texas I spoke to a class of about 50 grassroots activists about using SocNets to communicate their message and reach out to their supporters online.

I wanted to convey three key points with my presentation:

1. What are these SocNets anyway?
2. Why they matter.
3. Tips and tricks to using specific SocNets.

I got asked about putting my powerpoint up online, so without further ado, here it is.

SocNets Training Class

Of course, most of this will only make sense if you hear me give the presentation - but then to do that, all you have to do is ask.

This piece originally appeared at joshua.trevino.at.

I didn't want an iPhone -- though I had fun with its launch day 48 hours back -- because I haven't the slightest desire to interact with AT&T's inferior network, and because I'm pretty sure that iPhone 2.0 or 3.0 will have some extraordinary feaures and, more important, be unlocked. But I did want an invite to Pownce. I wanted one badly enough to spend a great deal of time insulting Scoble, annoying Susan Wu with mercenary inquiries, and posting public pleas. Partly this was because I'm a sucker for web 2.0 fads, but mostly it was because I'd been doing some thinking about the last such fad, namely, Twitter.

I saw off of Todd Zeigler’s twitter that Hillary has started her very own social networking site!

Because MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the other 91 socnets out there aren’t enough…

Now, the other top-tier Democratic presidentials are doing this – Obama’s got his own and Edward’s has OneCorps, but as my Mother always said…

I think this is one case where I don’t want Republican’s to imitate the Dem’s online practices.

I created an account with the campaign, and the largest group, with a whooping 23 members is LGBT COMMUNITY FOR HILLARY CLINTON. For those of you who didn’t go to a liberal college like myself LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual & Transgendered - what a mouthful.

I don’t think that the investment in time and energy to run these in-house platforms is well spent. At best you’ll get some people who’d never normally join Facebook or MySpace to create a profile on the Campaign’s socnet. But, I think the more likely situation is that the campaign is stealing its own lunch.

Most of the people who will make a profile will be the hardcore activists who already have a profile on Facebook. Furthermore, the work they’re doing to create content on the campaign’s own little internal socnet isn’t reaching anyone beyond the gated community. For a campaign, one of the primary purposes of a socnet is to have its modern media volunteers engaging with other people online and promoting the candidate.

These in-house socnets, like Clinton’s, suck energy, time and resources away from where activists should be focused: reaching out to undecided, or as yet unengaged voters, and instead channel the focus inward. In effect the campaign is connecting with itself.

A final note, related to socnets, but thankfully not to the Dems. Danah Boyd has a great blog essay, “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (hat tip again to Todd). What’s really interesting is how Danah looks at the growth of MySpace and Facebook, and how and why people decide to use one socnet over another. I’ll comment more on her piece later.

Last week Patrick Ruffini wrote about benefits of using the web to mobilize grassroots and reach opinion leaders and early adopters. Young Voter Strategies at George Washington University recently released a new study that shows e-campaigns aren't just added bonuses, but crucial to winning tight elections.

Something changed in 2004 and again in 2006. Suddenly, voters aged 18-29 started turning up at the polls. Millenials, those born between 1977 and 1997, cast 4.3 million more votes in 2004 than 2000 with 49% of the age group voting. In 2006, Millenials increased their votes by 2 million from the 2002 mid-term election. If this trend continues, our youngest voters will be the deciding factor in many elections.

The bad news is that Millenials largely favor Democrats. In 2006, 60% of 18-29 year-olds voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates. The picture gets a little more scary when factoring in research that voting is habit forming, and once an individual supports a particular party for three elections, they are likely to form a life-long loyalty to that party. However, not all is bleak for the Republicans.

According to YVS,

Today's young Republicans are very loyal Republicans--but they need to be targeted and turned out. ...young Republicans are more loyal and more intensely Republican than older Republicans. 60% believe the country is headed in the right direction. President Bush has a favorable rating of 76%, and the Republican Party has a favorable rating of 85%.

Young supporters of the Republican Party are out there and excited about being a Republican, but they won't show up on their own. They need to be asked, and the best way to reach them isn't through more paid advertising.

E-campaigns are crucial for reaching these eager, young voters. If asked, not only will they turn up at the polls, but they'll volunteer and work long hours to help out. The key here is reaching out to them on their terms. Millenials are more tech and media savvy than any other generation. Broadcast campaigns won't reach them. If tight races mean turning out every potential vote, campaigns must invest resources in the web.

This requires creating a strategy that goes beyond candidate blogs. Social networking is the hub that Millenials' lives revolve around. A Harvard Institute of Politics study in 2006 found that 97% of all college students logged onto Facebook at least once a month and that population is quickly entering the workforce. According to Facebook numbers, average users log onto the site at least 10-12 times a day.

While Facebook may seem like the silver bullet of the youth vote, it takes personal interaction to reach these voters. The tactics aren't expensive but are labor intensive. The key to recruiting new Republicans is developing one-on-one relationships. Facebook works to recruit, identify and gather these supporters. It's up to the campaigns to invest the manpower to reach them.

YVS sums it up pretty well:

For Republicans, the past two elections should spur them to devote resources to stemming the flow of today's youth to the Democratic Party. Not all young adults vote Democratic, and plenty of those who did in 2006 are not yet wed to the party. In 2008 and beyond, Republicans should develop a strategy to win back many of those young voters and build their party for the future.

An interesting online communications coup from France was the blog opened by François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France 1981-1995, a hero of the Left who's been dead for ten years.

You read that right.

Obviously it was not the real Mitterrand but a pseudonymous commentator, and a pretty good one at that. The articles were written in an elaborate and ironic style somewhat reminiscent of the highly educated, Machiavellian politician. More importantly, they showed a strong inside knowledge of French politics.

Unsurprisingly, the effort generated a lot of buzz, first online and then in the MSM. Questions as to the identity of the author, obviously someone well aware of the Left's byzantine inner struggles, raged.

As for myself, I actually heard about it not through blogs but through Facebook. The author of the blog created a pretty good profile for François Mitterrand, complete with "It's Complicated" as his Relationship Status, a hilarious reference to the late President's famous philandering habits and secret family.

I think this actually marks the first political initiative in France that leveraged socnets, and not just blogs/video, to generate feedback.

As for the author's identity, the blogosphere's ruthless power exposed it pretty quickly. After idle speculation by some journalists, a blogger at Nuesblog exposed the author as Bruno-Roger Petit, a former journalist and now communications director for Arnaud Montebourg, a young hot rising star of the Left. This was done by first comparing some hints from the blog's content with movements by Mr Petit, such as tales of attending certain meetings, etc. — true detective work.

Then the blogger posted the following comment on the Mitterrand blog: "What a good writer that Bruno-Roger P" ("ce qu'il écrit bien ce Bruno Roger P"). The comment was quickly deleted and the comments section locked, a perfect giveaway.

It later emerged from people close to Mr Petit that the blog was an idea by Mr Montebourg and jointly written by the two, even though they both still vigorously deny involvment with the blog (for some reason). A few days later, "François Mitterrand" announced he was shutting down his blog.

I can see three lessons from that story.

Lesson #1: Leveraging socnets works. I heard about this blog from Facebook before I heard about it from the blogosphere, YouTube or the MSM. I suspect this is going to be more and more the case as time passes. Mark Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook "the social operating system of the web," and I think he can do it. For me, Gmail is now an online data storage vault, when I want to reach someone I use Facebook. For politicians, that means socnets should be their #1 platform.

Lesson #2: Don't be afraid of crazy ideas. The dead president blog is a far out idea, but it turned out to be great. Who wouldn't love to read a blog by Reagan commenting on the weak GOP field, dropping delicious bits of insider info here and there? And how much leverage would it generate if it later "emerged" (on purpose or not) that the blog was written by say, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich?

Lesson #3: Buzz is there to be exploited. The outing of Messrs Petit and Montebourg as the authors of the blog should not have prompted them to shut it down — on the contrary! They had built great buzz, and they should have used their outing to increase the blog's popularity. Obviously, it is embarrassing for them since they used the pseudonymous platform to publish some off the record stuff, but hey — c'est la vie. This stuff is online, now you can't take it back. You might as well make the best of it.

This also shows what I say all the time: no matter how eager politicians are to tap into tech, they just don't get it. Messrs Petit and Montebourg should not have acted so rashly when they were outed by the blogosphere — hell, they should have been expecting it, and preparing for it all along. We all know it was bound to happen. When your buzz machine is generating the most buzz, that's not the best time to shut it down. It's time to expand it. Videos? MySpace? The potential was incredible.

Even though it was poorly executed, I still think the Mitterrand blog idea is great, and I hope politicians, in Europe and in America, put out more wacky, interesting initiatives like that.

As a Facebook addict, I've been closely following Facebook's new open API. This allows outside developers to create widgets/applications for Facebook, which users can allow to access their profile information and can then embed on their Facebook page.

I count 212 applications so far. However, under the politics tag there are only 4.

The most powerful application created so far is by Obama's campaign. Here's a good review of the app itself.

The power of the app is how it interacts with your Facebook info. For example it searchs your list of friends and then tells you who lives in a early primary state and allows you to send them a message to support Obama. Grassroots organizing online...

I'm not surprised that Obama's the first to jump on this bandwagon-one of the founders of Facebook left the company to work for Obama's campaign. Obama may have the lead right now, but it can't be too long 'til the rest of the field gets on the bandwagon (this includes Republicans, I hope!).

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.