Maybe facebook doesn't perform for marketers. Maybe the 300K new users are not of voting age. Maybe the Facebook users don't make contributions and don't involve themselves because they are too busy. Maybe the campaign managers are just a little more savvy than you are. Seriously, everyone knows about Facebook and if they are avoiding it maybe it's because it doesn't perform.

It actually appears that the "Students for Mitt Romney" application is campaign generated. StudentsForMitt.com is operated and paid for by the Romney campaign, as evidenced by the disclaimer at the bottom of the site. While the Facebook application could be voter generated, it's highly unlikely that someone outside the campaign would be able to so effectively integrate the application's sign up page with the campaign web site. The application itself holds some real potential if additional organizing tools are added to it in the coming months. With that said, I think the Romney campaign is making a mistake by branding their Facebook application around students. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch did a great interview with Napster founder Sean Parker a while back. (http://tinyurl.com/2ape89) Parker argues that the only thing that keeps ideas from spreading virally online is when it runs out of a population to appeal to. Facebook has expanded beyond its original student demographic when it opened the doors to the masses last fall. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in his F8 Keynote last month that over 60% of Facebook users are now outside of college, and that the fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up crowd. Candidates need to understand that Facebook isn't a college hang out anymore. It's where average people are increasingly connecting with the real world. The challenge for campaigns is to strike the right note to form those real world connections with their Facebook supporters. Between now and the 2008 Election, Facebook will enter more of the mainstream American society. Campaigns that fail to recognize that Facebook is no longer a college phenomenon will be missing out on the majority of the site's users.

I'm not sure about Facebook users not being of voting age. Most users are college students, who are ripe for the picking when it comes to politics. As it is, it's not surprising that Barack Obama has most of the support, because he's an anti-war Democrat and a generally likeable person. As far as I know, he's the youngest candidate in the running, and that can only help among Facebook types. As an Obama supporter, I like having the application run on my profile so that people can get some information about him.
There is also an Election '08 application that runs a voting feature and allows for users to display their candidate and various news stories on their profile. Currently, Barack Obama is way ahead with 24% of the vote (the runner up is Giuliani with 9%). So, this should be a heads up for the other candidates.

Find someone else besides Obama to talk about on Facebook. As the original post shows, he likely had inside help which contributed to his count (It’s been over three weeks since Facebook launched its Platform, and no candidates have followed Barack Obama (who may have had an inside tip about the launch) by building their own Facebook apps.) Also, the last time I surfed Facebook I found plenty of profiles that were not of voting age. Not saying they all are, but there is a base of non-voting age peeps there. As I wrote above, maybe Facebook just doesn't perform for marketers and that's why it is not be used. Just a thought...

Why don't you ask President Dean if it's worth mobilizing college students. He had TONS of support when I was in college, and I don't think I met a single person who voted. I asked when they complained about Bush's victory.

Netroots are great and all, and will be more important in years to come, but energizing the biggest voting block in America that DOESN'T VOTE is a waste of time and money.

Considering that voter turnout has increased in both of the last two election cycles, that is a really uninformed slam on the value of energizing young voters, smitter14. See http://youngvoterstrategies.org/index.php?tg=articles&idx=More&topics=37... for starters.