The long and short of it is the tools are irrelevant. Building a community and an online reputation is what is needed, and that is a different skill than making a video or having a MySpace page.

Candidates who play with MySpace and YouTube today aren't going to have time to learn Twitter tomorrow, and what happens when YouTube is replaced by VideoEgg or Eyespot or some other Web 2.0 software?

The key is simplicity - the whole point of Web 2.0 is forgetting the back end and focusing on content.

Hire a reliable social media consultant who has created online communities in the product marketing, PR, college, or music space, and let them decide what technology your local community will feel comfortable with. It may be a fancy Ajax interface in Seattle, but a simple blog in Kansas.

The important aspect is not what your platform is, whether MySpace, Facebook, blogs or a website, but how accessible that platform is and whether or not you're actively reaching out to the potential campaign evangelists in your district.

How do they want to be connected to you? How do they want to be organized? And how do you promote what you're doing, so it gets replicated by larger online groups who thank you with link and traffic attention?

We ought to have the answer to this in the Philly mayor's race, where many of the candidates had some insane number of MySpace friends in relation to their actual support.

The totals were as follows, with their actual vote in parentheses:

Tom Knox 6,439 (70,043)
Chaka Fattah 4,568 (43,141)
Michael Nutter 888 (104,299)
Dwight Evans 250 (22,295)
Bob Brady -- (43,200)

Two of the candidates had about 10% of their supporters on MySpace (!). That's the equivalent of a Presidential candidate (in the general) with 6 million friends. The Philly mayoral candidates have to be judged as more successful than any of the Presidential candidates on MySpace.

Now, let's turn it around. Now that we've seen the upper limits of what MySpace can do, what impact did it have? I would have to assume that this would be a gold mine of new voters, particularly in primaries that tend to skew old.

MySpace didn't have the chance to swing the outcome because the margin of victory was so much greater than any of the candidate's friend counts. However, the winning candidate had less than 1% of his supporters on MySpace. Not only that, but he surged to victory on a wave of grassroots support at the end -- and he did it without MySpace apparently.

I do think that social networking can be *more* relevant in local races because of the local connection -- you're more likely to actually *know* the other people in the community. And it's easier to make a difference (one would think). Going by the numbers, candidates like Knox and Fattah should have used MySpace to great effect. Did they, and it just wasn't enough? Or did their MySpace friends fail to show up on Election Day?

The internet can be used to create global, national, or local campaigns as well as it can be used to create campaigns on any issue or any candidate for any position. Computers have long been called virtual machines. "Virtual" because they can be programmed to do just about anything (except think, so they say). And networked computers are more powerful exponentially raised to the power of the number of computers/nodes/end users connected to it. That is pretty powerful and virtually anything is possible.

In other words, the net can be used to great effect to run state and local campaigns. Think MeetUp on steroids for local campaigns. Even if you are doing a lot of flesh pressing, managing get togethers, rallies, debates, etc. using social management tools, be they available on another's platform (MySpace, Facebook, Care2.com, Change.org, townhall.com, Personal Democracy Forum, etc.) or on your own social network platform makes it easier to connect to voters.

With so many people on the big social networks, it is very likely that many highly-engaged voters in any district is already online connected to their own networks of friends, family, and communities they belong to. Take advantage of these people. They are your grassroots organizers. And they have already figured out how to use the tools you want to use to organize them. They can recruit and train other voters, etc.

You can also build your own social network and Web 2.0 platforms for free or cheap using widgets from companies like KickApps.com or complete social network platforms from companies like GoingOn.com.

And everyone can use YouTube.

And never lose sight of the fact that discussion boards, AOL Chatrooms, LISTSERVs, and instant messengers are also tools to deepen the relationship between candidates and voters (Not Web 2.0, but Web 1.0, which still about creating communities and social movements, even if the tools were simpler).

And since many of the opportunities for User 2.0 (which, more than Web 2.0, really explains what is going on) campaigns are free or really cheap, there is no excuse not to use them.

For those of you who say we must demonstrate Return On Investment (votes), remember that we still haven't come close to figuring out how to use these amazing new tools. This is the time for experimentation. If we wait until the data is in, we could be left in the dust. Think of the disadvantage candidates who resisted using TV until it was proven to deliver votes had for the first 10-15 years of the TV era.

The most important thing is WHAT you use the tools to do. Organize, communicate, educate, mobilize, inspire... And if it can be done with one staffer managing a group of volunteers with free software, it can be done too cheaply not to even try.

Alan Rosenblatt
Executive Director, Internet Advocacy Center
AKA DrDigiPol (drdigipol.com)

Some great thoughts here -- I'm glad I asked. Clearly, we're going to see a lot of groundbreaking use of technology at all levels of politics.

- Ben

I'm sorry I'm late to this conversation and got it from the Future Majority reference ...

I agree with Ben that the numbers don't necessarily jive with being beneficial to localized efforts - but I'm with Patrick on this too. If you apply traditional field rules and organizing to tech tools you get a better result.

Cool thing about sites like MySpace is you can search by zip code. So essentially you can find every MySpace person within your area. With a super volunteer on the campaign you can begin by friending all of them - and keep tabs on new MySpace additions within your district. Further along in the cycle if you then coordinate the page with tasks and "at home" or "from home" volunteer opportunities then you might be able to give birth to a kind of web committee for your campaign.

Integrate that with a troop of local bloggers, a facebook program, loop it in with your "online grassroots fundraising committee" and you've built a good base of 5-10 people who essentially have the internet cornered for your campaign. Compare that to an opponent's efforts and I would wager to bet you've outdone them by a considerable margin.

The trick then is to fold that into a functioning volunteer base much like you would use in your bricks and mortar office. If there are clever staffers who can come up with specific tasks that continue the candidate's profile online I think it can do a lot to raise a candidate's online profile.

Making that leap to IRL is the true test. If you can somehow begin integrating your web volunteers to your IRL volunteers toward the end and fold them all into GOTV both in a virtual way and in your phone bank programs then I think you have the perfect way to combine the two.

that said - since this is a whole new world no one has ever successfully done this on a district scale. I think it'd be neat to put together an actual "new media" plan that integrates field and fundraising and develops a longterm strategic plan for a campaign and then look at how it either worked or didn't work.

Web 2.0 is good at bringing NEW PEOPLE into the process.

Local campaigns (state house or city council) involve a lot of mobilizing of people already exposed to the process in some way at some level (have voted, have had a yard sign, have contributed money or resources, have volunteered).

Aside from friends, family and business associates of the candidate, relatively few new (or virgin) political activists are brought into the process.

What networking that does take place, takes place face to face (f2f) at usual political venues and groups the candidate was a member of before becoming a candidate. Face to face is vital part of building credibility as a local candidate.

Local volunteers, like all local campaign resources, are very scarce and five to ten volunteers could be more productively be walking neighborhoods or on the phone. In local races one to one voter contact is critical.

The candidate SHOULD have a web site for press and with push button contributions and for voters to find out more information. The web site address should be on all campaign lit.

Local campaigns should be careful that in the minds of some voters and reporters MySpace is associated with sexual predators. Need to be careful with comments & friends.

Once you get beyond a local house race, it is impossible to knock on every door, so Web 2.0 may be appropriate. A statewide race such as for Governor or US Senator may benefit from Web 2.0 -- especially if the candidate has name recognition -- watch Al Franken's campaign for US Senate in Minnesota. Visit Al's MySpace page. Or visit my MySpace page JBCallahan and check out my friends (including Al Franken).

But, at the Presidential/national level Presidential campaigns and political parties are building their own online social networking tools. As application stacks like VM/LAMP/Drupal or Joomla/CiviCRM become customizable appliances you will see more sophisticated web sites at all levels.

Fundamentally, a MySpace page is a page for fans. A celebrity who already has fans can use a MySpace page to convert fans into an army of low dollar donors and volunteers.

Of course, I am presenting the conventional wisdom...eventually somebody out there will find a way and prove me wrong.

Jim Callahan
MySpace\JBCallahan
Orlando, FL