CIOZone.com - Professional Network for CIOs and IT Professionals

SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH A PURPOSE

While my.barackobama.com looks like a social network such as Facebook, it's a more focused one, Rospars says. "Folks are using our Web site for online donations or making phone calls, or planning events and being active in the community," rather than to socialize, he says.

Even while trying to build my.barackobama.com into the campaign's online center of gravity, its Web presence also extends across a constellation of other Internet watering holes including MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, BlackPlanet—and, of course, Facebook. Facebook and other general purpose social networks are valuable to the campaign because they let volunteers reach out through online connections they have established for other purposes and bring some of those connections into the campaign.

"We have several hundred thousand supporters on Facebook, and those folks are able to reach out and find others on their network," Rospars says, and they have been effective at reaching out to friends in states with an upcoming primary. "We've tried to engage that community and all the communities to do real substantive work," Rospars says, touting the value of "engaging people in those communities on their own terms." And when it comes to activities that can only be accomplished through barackobama.com, such as using its online phone bank tool, "we try to make sure those opportunities are both obvious and attractive" to the campaign's Facebook and MySpace friends.

Hughes leads a team of community managers who monitor activity on the my.barackobama.com communities and the affinity groups on other sites, alike, trying to keep it productive. For example, they individually review requests to form new my.barackobama.com interest groups to make sure they are appropriate to the campaign's mission and don't duplicate the efforts of another group that already exists, he says.

"There is a challenge there, in terms of figuring out how much organization needs to come from here, in the center, and how much we can rely on the grassroots to organize well," Hughes says. For the most part, allowing volunteers a healthy dose of autonomy has worked well, he says.

The grassroots organization that has grown up around the electronic community lets the campaign staff magnify its own efforts. For example, earlier this month the campaign organized more than 100 "Vote for Change" voter registration events, at least one in every state in the country, with campaign headquarters providing coordination and training. Now many of the local organizers who participated are continuing the effort with follow-up events on their own. "We don't have unlimited staff work on those events every single weekend," Hughes says, but with enough volunteers it can still happen. "For the most part, we haven't even talked to those people; they're planning these events on their own."

Several of the campaign workers interviewed emphasized that online activity is most important when it produces offline action. While working for the campaign in Los Angeles, Spitzer-Rubenstein says he looked for people who were "willing to go out of their way to make a difference," and those are usually the ones who were willing to show up in person. "They're more likely to be committed to it than someone who has signed up online but hasn't had to do anything about it," he says. And when it comes to the ultimate goal, he is convinced, "the best way get somebody's vote is to knock on their door and talk to them in person."

But Rospars argues volunteers can be active both online and off. "We want them to reach out to their friends who haven't been to our site. We want them to do voter contact to the people in their community whom they don't know. Or they can go take our message to the folks in their address book who they do know," he says.