Rachael Bell, an 18 year old MySpace user in the United Kingdom, learned a very hard lesson in what you should and shouldn’t post online.
Recently Rachael posted an invite on her MySpace site for a house party at her place while her mom was away. Instead of the handful of friends she had intended on showing up, she landed several hundred people who completely trashed and ruined her house.
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YouTube, Digg, Netscape, and many other social networking sites have opened up to the political scene and traffic has increased to ALL of them because of it. Mixing politics with the social realm of the internet was a winner long before it came about. It was only a matter of time before these social giants were ready to go live with what may be one of the most important part of political campaigns moving forward.
Now MySpace has entered the game. Welcome to MySpace Impact.
Thoughts?
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There is a BIG shift in the way political campaigns conduct election war these days. During the 2006 elections I was contracted to do some work for Sharron Angle for Congress and it was a very educational experience and the race taught us many things about the new direction of political campaign marketing.
In our race for congress we were lucky that the opposition had little experience in online marketing. The reason we were lucky is that I had my hands full with other parts of the campaign and couldn’t spend any time on the website or out and about in the www community.
In the end we lost by about 400 votes, but the knowledge that came from working on such a campaign is something I’m thankful for. I was able to see one of our opponents get ripped to shreds by the online community because he virtually ignored them and his site did everything possible to avoid having to engage the group. At the time, this attitude worked because the social networks of Nevada were limited. Now, however, these networks have gained big momentum and I believe that if we were to see a repeat of that race he would have a very tough time slipping by without getting the online community involved.
The same can be said across the country. With more and more voters and activists moving their networks to the web, political campaigns are forced to move in that direction with their campaign plans and message marketing schemes. I believe we’re witnessing the birth of a new era in US elections.
Political campaigns would be wise to lend an ear to this massive movement of information and there are a plethora of tools that can help them do just that. I’ve compiled a list of what I believe will be the top ten players in internet activism.
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As a campaign consultant and internet activist I can attest to the direction political campaigns are heading and a LOT of it is shifting to the Internet. Political campaigns such as John McCain’s (by the way I met with his blogger, Patrick Hynes, in DC last week and he admitted that the McCain website was launched with a lot of bugs and was not ready to be public) have fully embraced the power of social networking and the online community, and most other campaigns are beginning to do the same thing.
Digg.com is getting in on the action as well. Digg recently added a 2008 Elections category and it quickly became a happening place. Wikia has also added a political section that in just a matter of days was getting Dugg and mentioned on big sites like Little Green Footballs.
YouTube must be seeing dollar signs in this as well. The video sharing giant recently launched “YouChoose“, a sub-site for political campaign related videos to be published and viewed.
When you have Hillary Clinton announcing her Presidency via a YouTube video, you know it’s a powerful tool.
Even the group I work with as a private contractor, Citizen Outreach, is getting ready to publish a YouTube channel that will display news related to Nevada politics and other tidbits. It’s some thing we feel is too important to pass up.
While YouTube is taking hits on the copyright front, it is still growing and I think Google is pulling the right strings by adding this new YouChoose section.
Only time will tell if it’s successful though…
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It was only a matter of time before web 2.0 was embraced by the Conservative realm of the internet. Conservatives, I’m sometimes ashamed to admit, aren’t always the first group to jump on a new innovation, but it can be said that Conservatives know how to make one work rather quickly for their purpose.
The blogosphere is a great example. Bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Patrick Hynes, Erick Erickson, Scott Johnson, Chuck Muth, LGF, and others had success on a proportionate scale soon after the Blogosphere was given life. LGF, for example, can has in excess of 70,000+ visitors in a single day. No doubt, Conservatives know how to communicate opinions, articulate issues, and network together to inform others will relative ease.
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Fox News has a great story running about YouTube and how Terrorists use the servers to host terror videos and share them with the world.
With the global spread of high-speed Internet connections and the relative anonymity afforded by the world’s biggest and busiest sites, extremists have found a new theater to display violence and anti-American propaganda.
My feelings are very mixed on this issue. I really haven’t decided how I feel about YouTube allowing this kind of tripe, but I think I’ll eventually have to admit that it should not be censored.
Why? Well, first of all, how the heck is YouTube going to stop it anyway? The site is free, and the day we demand that every video published be instantly reviewed or edited by humans is the day it will no longer be free. Besides, right now there is a user powered system that does knock out a lot of these videos. It just takes time.
The gentleman who was being interviewed on the Fox News Video was defending YouTube, which at first kind of bothered me, but the more I thought about it the more I understood his viewpoint. The problem with us wanting YouTube to censor this stuff is knowing how and where to draw the line.
I agree that it’s terrible to see this junk on the web, but at least YouTube allows US the chance to get it taken down.
Thoughts?
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Some of you are going to dislike this post, but I just have to let it out. I’m sick and tired of this Anna Nicole Smith story. Fox News… give me my news back. Please?
For the last two days EVERY cable news network has been playing HOUR after HOUR of Anna Nicole Smith headlines. Her death last week was indeed interesting, but only for a few minutes. And it is tragic that her daughter will have to grow up without a mother. The whole thing was very unfortunate, but that’s life. If you think the story is sad, then what about the other people who passed away in that time period? Families lost children and parents due to drunk driving, murder, accidents, etc. It happens virtually every minute of every day. So why is this story so important?
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I don’t know about you, but when I think of Dan Rather I instantly think “blogosphere”. It’s almost astonishing to consider how quickly the media world forced themselves to forget the power of the internet and its community. One of the most influential News Hosts was taken down by a handful of bloggers, and when I say taken down, I mean he went down in flames. But that seems to be long gone now. It’s not even brought up in most related conversations.
The good news is, the blogosphere is alive and well. In fact, I would say the community is sitting quietly, waiting for the 2008 campaign trail to really start heating up. I predict the internet will play a major role in the outcome of the 2008 election cycle and we’ll begin seeing new forms of information dominance move in to play.
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