Social Networking

As NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrated yesterday, the Millennial Generation played a key role in this election, voting in higher numbers than in any recent election and in a more unified manner than any other age group - 66% of Millennials supported President-Elect Obama, compared to only 32% who supported U.S. Sen. John McCain. Millennials constituted a greater percentage of the vote than those 65 and over. Without the overwhelming support of Millennials, Obama's victory margin would have been 1.5% instead of 6% nationally, and there might have been a lot more nail-biting on Tuesday night.

We're still waiting for the final numbers on the youth vote to come in, but a new CIRCLE report projects that youth turnout increased between 1 and 6 percentage points this year - an increase that translates into several million new voters. What was responsible for this increase?

One obvious answer is the candidate himself; Obama connected with young voters like no other political figure in recent memory. He gave them something to get excited about and ways to get involved. Shirts sporting his visage flew off the shelves at Urban Outfitters. He is, simply put, cool.

Others might point to the fact that his campaign organized a superlative ground game and created a fundraising juggernaut. Still others might note that the Obama campaign demonstrated a mastery of technology and deployed it on a scale never before seen in American politics - this is a point that Sarah Lai Stirland makes in Wired this week, and something I and others at NDN have talked about a lot.

The Obama campaign's message, organization, and use of new tools were all game-changers. But I believe one of the biggest boosts in the youth turnout may actually have had nothing to do with Obama himself. On the day before the election, I wrote about the Facebook Election Rally, which allowed users to select automated status message updates urging friends to get out the vote, including a link to join the rally themselves and the option to invite other friends manually. By the end of the rally, nearly two million Facebook users donated their status messages for GOTV purposes. Of those users, 70% put up messages encouraging friends to get out the vote for Obama, 21% put up messages for McCain, and 7% put up messages saying to simply "get out the vote."

Then, on election day, Facebook essentially became one giant GOTV tool. The login page said "VOTE" in giant letters, and at the top of the home page was a button that said "I voted," next to a counter of Facebook users who had voted so far. When I checked at around 10 PM, the counter had reached nearly five million.

From a sociological perspective, the combined effect was very powerful. Anyone who logged into Facebook near or on election day was inundated not only with reminders to get involved, but also bombarded with reminders that their friends were voting. I don't think this has ever happened before, and seems much more powerful than any "Vote or Die"-style MTV ad could be - seeing so many friends involved has a real impact, particularly on youth. Facebook is helping to create a culture of civic participation among Millennials, and that participation quickly becomes habit. And if it continues, this could have an even greater impact in the next few elections, since less than half of Millennials were eligible to vote in this election. If Millennials gave Obama between 4 and 5 points nationally in this election... well, you do the math.

I just blasted away close to $2.8 billion in pork-barrel spending in three minutes using veto lasers and I'm only on level 2 with 4 McCains left. Not too shabby, right? This is all thanks to an application for Facebook created by U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign which, instead of reeling in young people as it is most likely designed to do, serves as a glaring illustration of how poorly they understand the demographic.

"Pork Invaders," as the game is called, is an application that anyone with a Facebook account can install in which the player shoots piggy-banks with vetoes as the piggies move back and forth across the screen dropping small, what appear to be, upside-down crosses at your McCain-logo-box-ship. As you skewer pork with vetoes, you save taxpayers millions, but be sure to keep an eye out for the pork-barrels -- strike down one of those and you're well on your way to balancing the budget and paying off our national debt. And after completing a level, you are rewarded with McCain campaign talking points trashing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's record on earmarks while trumpeting his own. Check out the screen-shot below.

I doubt this venture into the world of social networking will give Obama supporters much to worry about. The game looks like an artifact of the early 1980s and surely those upside-down crosses will not do much to woo fence-sitting Christian conservatives. Moreover, when you look at just the sheer numbers, Obama has around 1,040,000 supporters on Facebook compared to McCain's 150,000. Still, I want to at least commend the McCain campaign for making the effort to reach out through social networks, but releasing an online game that looks painfully out of date will not only remind voters of the candidate's own distance from youth but may also instantiate McCain's recent declaration of computer illiteracy (see Maggie Barker's post), neither association being particularly flattering.

At NDN and the New Politics Institute, we have done a lot of work to help progressives better understand social networking. Click on the link here to find practical guidance on how to best engage social networks, including a memo written by Facebook's chief privacy officer. Below is a video from a recent NPI event during which Beth Kanter, a professional blogger and technology trainer, shares some of her thoughts on how to successfully utilize social networks.

For anyone who is looking for a little break from Super Tuesday news:

Facebook continues to prove that it is more than just a place to find out what your friend's favorite movies are. The BBC is crediting the social networking site with sparking massive protests in Colombia and around the world. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 2 million people protested in Bogota yesterday. A march which grew out of a Facebook group started by Oscar Morales in Colombia called, "Un Million de Voces Contra las Farc" (a million voices against Farc). The group has over a quarter of a million members.

A Facebook application, with over 4,000 active members, was also developed which provides a forum for users to share photos and print out stickers and posters relating to the cause.

This movement is another great example of how leveraging new tools, like social networking, allows for more people from more places to translate virtual organizing into real-world effects.

(And thanks to Maggie Barker for turning me on to this story.)