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From Meetup to MySpace

by Patrick Ruffini :: September 22nd, 2007 1:12 am

Much of the conversation about the ‘08 campaign online has revolved around things like voter-generated media (the 1984 video) or controversies brewing at the blurring edge between the blogosphere and campaigns (PhoneyFred.org). By and large these are controversies that wouldn’t have been possible last election cycle, which speaks to the medium’s rising viability as a place for anyone to get a message across. But when it comes to what the campaigns themselves are doing, I’m afraid the truth is far closer to Mark Cuban’s “The Internet is dead and boring.”

Take a gander at the ‘08 sites. Then look at where DeanforAmerica.com was at this point in the cycle. Or the Bush and Kerry sites three years ago today.

Can we seriously argue that we have evolved? Big images have replaced gobs of text. Video is now in Flash instead of Windows Media. We have Facebook and YouTube icons. But that’s pretty the only difference. Fresh content is still all too sparse; the blogs are if anything even less ambitious than they were in 2004. Do you get the sense from any of them there is a real, massive, always-on, press-the-flesh campaign?

If you look at the apples-to-apples comparison between Dean and any of the Democrat sites, then we are actually backsliding. The Dean homepage was aesthetically questionable but always brimmed with energy. You had Dean Team Leaders, Get Local, Raise the Roots, Meetup, the bat, the email list counter, and of course, the blog. Every element of the campaign (it seemed like) was open sourced and transparent. The blog had something like 10-15 posts a day, each with dozens if not hundreds of comments, with a constellation of hundreds of [State/County/interest group] for Dean fansites. Does anything comparable exist, say for Obama? Hardly. His site is beautiful, but corporate. The grassroots on it seems orchestrated, like whenever the campaign decides to do a dinner with the candidate or a new donor matching appeal.

Now, I know, I know, we’re not supposed to talk about Dean. He screamed, right? Yes he did — but it had nothing to do with the Internet. It had to do with the fact that he was nuts. What has yet to be tried — and it looks like it won’t be in 2008 — is a non-crazy, non-fringe candidate appropriating a flood-the-zone strategy (not you, Ron Paul).

But this is not just about the outward appearance of momentum on these sites, which — yes — can be illusory. It’s also that the new tools that have been introduced in the ‘08 campaign are less useful. Think of the biggest innovation in 2003: Meetup. That was actually useful. It enabled people to actually come together offline, and create a living, breathing organization. The Dean campaign had to do a lot of work to make Meetup suit its needs, and the whole thing was later subsumed by house party planners, but Meetup was leaps and bounds ahead of what we had in 2000 and 2002 to actually organize a real campaign online.

In Bush World too, the leap from 2000 to 2004 was especially profound. The 2000 websites were literally little more than brochureware. The only one who had tried to do anything innovative in the primaries was McCain, who parceled out Excel spreadsheets of New Hampshire voters to supporters and ran targeted banner ads in Virginia looking for petition circulators. In 2004, on GeorgeWBush.com (where I was part of the team that included Chuck DeFeo, Mike Turk, and Mindy Finn), you could make phone calls to voters, write letters to swing state voters targeted by affinity groups, organize house parties (30K+ throughout the course of the campaign), and actually organize your own neighborhood walk with targeted lists of voters. To be fair, the Kerry camp ran many of the same programs, with distributed phone banking applied to volunteer mobilization.

All of this functionality is still out there, and though it is dormant in places, few campaigns have really shown any interest in dramatically improving on these platforms. (Obama did just launch distributed phone banking directed at volunteers.) When it comes to online organizing and mobilization, I think we will see only incremental improvement in 2008 — a far cry from the big leap from ‘00 to ‘04.

And what is different in ‘08? Without question, the biggest thing is the rise of social media. Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are allowing us to build ever-more influential and elaborate political communities online. It’s creating an audience for politics online that extends beyond the relatively stale candidate sites, and that’s a good thing.

But much as I love these platforms, I also must question whether they don’t represent a slowing of innovation from 2004. Yes, it’s remarkable that a candidate can quickly acquire hundreds of thousands of friends on MySpace. But that is pretty much all you can do. You can’t really mobilize for volunteers or donors; in fact, you can’t message any group above 1,000 people on Facebook. Even Obama’s Facebook application was just headlines. (And indeed, doesn’t an email signup box on profiles — still the most useful thing in e-politics — violate some sort of unwritten code of these social networks?) What was more useful, Dean’s 180,000 Meetup members acquired over the course of the campaign, or Obama’s 320,000 “Million for” group built up in weeks? Unquestionably the former.

The social networks were founded to help people organize their private social space. That’s different than Markos hanging out his shingle and asking any online progressive activist to join in, or loosely connected individuals coming together at Meetups. That’s not to say that Facebook, MySpace, etc. won’t prove useful, but it is to say that their very purpose (privacy, friends, etc.) militates against flourishing mass movements that are easily transferable to a campaign.

Web 2.0 does represent a resetting of sorts for the the Internet. The technology is more advanced, but the campaigns’ grasp of the available options is more limited. In a sense it’s like 1996 and 2000 all over again: We have to have a Web site. But it took until 2004 for both Republicans and Democrats to figure out how to actually use them Web sites. Now, it’s We have to have a Facebook profile. Yes, you do. But how does one actually use it to its full potential beyond being a communications vehicle — especially with the messaging options so limited?

This isn’t to say that innovation hasn’t continued apace in the traditional space. It has. A number of candidates (Clinton, Obama, Paul) have “figured out” how to “harness” the Internet to create a movement as large as Dean’s, largely without the out-of-control frenetic energy (scratch Paul from this caveat). They have done this largely through email, the dinosaur of online marketing.

There’s also video, which is the single thing that has evolved the most from last cycle. With the proliferation of broadband and the invention of YouTube and frictionless content distribution, you can’t argue that video is less of a player than it was in ‘04. But are the campaigns themselves producing more and better video to satisfy the audience’s seemingly endless appetite for it? Progress here is uneven at best.

Every campaign in ‘04 “got” the importance of video. There was a reason that if you went to GeorgeWBush.com, you’d see a video front and center most of the time. Those videos were a mix of campaign ads and more informal campaign trail footage, with a new video once or twice a week. And that’s about the formula people are still using today — which is surprising considering the fact that the tools to shoot and edit video have gotten much more accessible since ‘04.

Most of the innovation on the Republican side has been in video, where it’s Romney’s mashup content, Running with Rudy, and Fred’s effective, irreverent on-the-trail videos. But the content is still pretty thin gruel. No one is really doing serialized video, which is the most effective way to build an audience for video (just ask LonelyGirl15). The tools exist to package up a daily 2-minute video with highlights from the trail and a decent amount of behind-the-scenes footage (in green rooms or the big guy’s SUV) and the technology is now such that neither the person shooting or editing would necessarily need to be a full-time video person. The next step is daily live video, thanks to ubiquitous broadband.

Thanks to Web 2.0, there’s no question that online innovation has really sped up since 2004. But in politics, it seems to have slowed down. We still have a little over a year to figure out why, and to unleash the next great wave of political innovation online.

Tagged: meetup myspace online politics socnets technology web2.0

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