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Analysis: Clinton and Obama Can Learn a Thing or Two from Tila Tequila

Authored by Jay Baage on April 9, 2007 - 7:16am.
News Corp.'s MySpace has plans to host a general presidential vote on Jan. 1 and 2 of next year. It’s an interesting digital media experiment on many levels, putting the spotlight on what politics 2.0 is all about: making politics relevant, interactive, and immediate. However, the presidential candidates still have a lot to learn from Tila Tequila if they want to win the vote of the cool young kids on MySpace.

Why is the MySpace election experiment such a big deal? Well, it shows the impact of digital media on power and society.  

Presidential candidates in this election are, for the first time, creating pages on major online social networks that didn't exist or were nascent in 2004, including MySpace and Facebook. Though no gimmick, it seems it’s not the highest priority in the various campaign headquarters. But it should be.

MySpace, with its 170 million members, has, according to comScore Media Metrics, 65 million monthly U.S. visitors - 85% of which are of voting age. MySpace users are mostly young people. According to the blog Lost Remote, Nielsen Research show they are 42% more likely to watch politically related online video, 35% more likely to research politics on-line, and 44% more likely to listen to political audio online.

Even the mainstream newspapers are taking notice. USA Today noted the following in an article on Thursday:

“Politicians have leveraged tech innovations since the 19th century, when locomotives and the telegraph helped them reach remote places. But an explosion of new and inexpensive technologies since the 2004 elections is transforming campaigns into tech-driven ventures, shifting the balance of power - with surprising and unsettling results.” 

YouTube launched its You Choose '08 Web page earlier this year, which brings together the individual video channels created by U.S. presidential hopefuls like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. Candidates can post videos addressing particular issues, while users can submit video and written comments for possible posting.

So how does it look so far for the candidates? One measure is the number of friends they have on MySpace.

As of Friday noon, here’s how it stands:
http://impact.myspace.com/

Barak Obama: 93,659 friends
John Edwards: 17,591 friends
Hillary Clinton: 8634 friends
Mitt Romney: 4424 friends
John McCain: 3929 friends
Rudy Giuliani: Private profile

As a comparison, model/performer Tila Tequila has 1,772,274 friends. But then again, her videos and pictures have a little more, eeh, spice than anything the presidential candidates have to offer.

Seriously, though, embracing "voter-generated content" and making a connection with people in cyberspace is key in the high-profile race for the White House, in which candidates are expected to seek more than $1 billion for 2008.

With campaigns starting earlier than ever, politicians are pressed to raise more money faster to freeze out rivals. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is using one of the newer tech innovations, a "widget." His site offers supporters computer code to paste on their own blogs. Blog readers who click on that widget are sent to Giuliani's JoinRudy2008 site, where officials can collect their e-mail addresses and other information.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney uses Salesforce.com software to find do-nors. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff says candidates need tech to manage donors as though they're customers. "They have to. Today's world is dominated by technology," he says to USA Today.

Moreover, below is a table from the the Wall Street Journal that outlines what some of the big Internet companies are offering in terms of campaign features:


Trust me, you’ll see a lot more of this as we get closer to the election. A few thousand friends on MySpace is not enough to win the young vote in America.

Now that politics and politicians as well as voters are going online - when will you actually be able to cast your vote on the Internet in the US?

While most people agree that Internet voting is the way of the future, new controversies over the security of e-voting machines and internet voting continue to crop up, making new machines and procedures just as problematic as the ones they replace.

So, my best bet is that e-voting will not be available for the 2008 election – but hopefully in time for 2012.

Joakim Baage
tags: Internet | Marketing | MySpace | YouTube | Politics | Hillary Clinton | Barak Obama |



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