cross posted on Wactivist.com
The topic for today is myspace, social networking and politics.
I don't take credit for this. This page was the baby of Pederson interns Josh Bresiblatt, Alex Samuels Jamie Bellian. But when i started with Pederson, I knew that we had to be on there, we had to get there first and we had to justify the time expense. So i handed the project off to the trio who took it on as their own and made it into the awesome page that it is\was.
The point I will try to make here is that I and the Pederson campaign wanted to make youth outreach a priority and thats the difference between most political campaigns and what we did and what should be done in the future.
Funny thing happened while we were doing this. I realized that all these people that Alex, Josh and Jamie were talking to online were either one of a number of options: Recently registered and not in the file, no voter history and thus not targetted or not registered at all. All the death toll for being a "Targetted" voter in a political campaign- at least most campaigns.
So I ( to Josh's chagrin ) told them to start taking every single "Friend" that was on myspace, facebook and Friendster and start putting it into the database, cross check it with the voter file and with the other social networking sites and wala, we know what type of voter they are and what EXACTLY we needed to do with them to make sure they were voting and voting by mail.
Suddenly, we started to grow this monster database of young voters and that led to other things that led to others and on and on. The plus side is we were not just capturing young voters, we were capturing middle aged voters as well and even some contributions and we were having an actual conversation with them that was two way instead of one way which is most campaigns.
Yes, they were essentially online stalkers, stalkers for voters though and yes the underlying problem here is that most people don't realize how dangerous having all this information on their pages is (because of ID Theft)but in a campaign you have to improvise and much to my own chagrin ( internet safety is a major concern of mine ) I doubt things will change that much and people will continue to put too much personal identifying information on these sites, but why not take advantage of it while its out there?