Well it appears that the Dean campaign has had their first bad bump in the Meetup.com numbers. Correction, not really a bump, more of a stall. What am I talking about, here are the stats from Meetup.com
- Oct. Dean has 716 Meetups in 341 cities
- Nov. Dean has 818 Meetups in 364 cities
- Dec. Dean has 902 Meetups in 362 cities
Now looking at these stats you might think, "WHAT, Dean is gaining in Meetups", and a couple of weeks ago I would have been one to agree. That was then, when I didn't know exactly how Meetup.com worked...
The real key number however as I have found out, is how many cities Meetups were attended in. This is because Meetup.com and their coordinators are doing there best to continuosly break up larger Meetups into smaller and smaller groups for a couple of reasons.
- Smaller groups create more interaction
- More Meetups create more business, which in turn means more Cheddar!
This is very evident as St. Louis (My home town) is having more meetup.com events for all of the candidates then it used to have, while there is no gain in actual Meetup participants (in some cases, there are less people showing. This is of course speaking broadly for ALL campaigns active in Meetup). Sooooo.... the actual number of Meetups are poor data to look at because of the changing business avenue Meetup is taking, while the cities number would be the most revelvant piece we are given. This also means that for the first time, Dean actually stalled in Meetup.com growth.
Now you may ask why does any of this matter, and why would I post about this. I need your help. I think for the interest of both better statistics and trends of grassroots support, we should all try and petition Meetup.com to also include a stat for how many members that actually attended the particular Meetup in a given month. If your a stat junkie like me, you'll love it! If not, then man, I just wasted a lot of your time.
support@meetup.com is the e-mail. Lets see some solid stats. I'm interested, is anyone else out there? Wouldn't you like to know how many Deaniacs or Clarkies or (put your candidate name here) attended Meetups each month?