Last week at the 2010 Politics Online conference in Washington, DC Microsoft unveiled a new software suite called Town Hall which will allow politicians and organizations to organize online and utilize social media to engage voters.
In an attempt to connect with voters online, Microsoft's Town Hall is part of a software suite designed to help campaigns, listen to and engage constituents in order to win elections.
Use Microsoft TownHall to scale your communication online, aggregate feedback, and gain voter insight. - Microsoft
It is designed to be able to be used by a large quantity of campaigns with a "plugin your name and issue" type of website and software. This type of software already exists and is used widely by politicians, some better than others.
What's unique here is that that software, if good, can be very costly and created by political consulting firms. It has not ever been made before, specifically for politics of this nature, by a software giant like Microsoft. While there are no details yet about cost, it certainly would be seemingly less than those of its competitors. I am very interested to see how it will be used by smaller budget campaigns of all types from politicians to activist organizations who hopefully will come up with new and creative methods of online organizing.