Are Your Voters Hip Enough To Use the Hottest Online Social Networks?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

At the end of June in New York City, the Personal Democracy Forum will take place.  There, at the most prominent intellectual event at the intersection of technology and politics, high-profile speakers will talk about cutting edge ideas and technologies that are changing the essence of campaigning.

I’m looking forward to attending the PDF event, and I think I’ll learn a lot there.  But as someone who is an avid blogger and user of popular social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, I increasingly wonder how out of touch this world may be from the average person – or voter.  Sure, using the social web to empower self-organizing voters and raise piles of money from many small donors worked for candidate Obama in 2008.  But how applicable is that model to future presidential elections?  What about governorships?  Congressional seats?  Mayoral races in small cities?

At the same time trade pubs like Washington, DC’s The Hill keep track of Congressional tweets in their “TwitterRoom,” it is unclear how useful such technologies will be back home when these officeholders run for re-election.  It’s also unclear how powerful they will be for challengers to use against incumbents.  There are a myriad of unprecedented situations that will be encountered in the 2010 election cycle.

I will write much more about voter demographics, regional cultures, and other factors may interact with emerging social technologies to influence (or not influence) elections, but here I simply want to point out one thing:  The best tools for geeks are not necessarily the best tools for a campaign.

Listening to the mainstream press and the blogosphere, one might think that Facebook was the only game in town, having slaughtered MySpace in the battle of hipness.  It is true that Facebook is very, very popular – and in my opinion quite useful as a platform for self-promotion.  Yet, in an interesting piece recently published at Nielsen Wire, it was found that while people in general spend more minutes on Facebook than on MySpace, when you parse people’s time by minutes watching video, MySpace is still the king.

Certainly budding rock stars, performing artists, and spokesmodels hoping to be noticed have not – and should not – abandon MySpace for the more beloved Facebook.  Even as these groups of people may experiment with newer technologies like Facebook and Twitter, they haven’t given up their core place to meet people and talk about their interests.  Time and time again, I have found through personal discussions and via random chance that the primary homepages (i.e., Web aggregation spots) of many Extremely Hot Chicks (EHC’s = aspiring dancers, models, actresses, and so on) are, you guessed it, MySpace pages with lots of photos and videos of them.  This may seem like a silly example, but if I were running for mayor of Santa Monica or Newport Beach or Malibu, my campaign would have a HUGE presence on MySpace and a de-emphasized one on Twitter.

There is a universe of social media out there, and this is a huge and complicated topic about which much more will be written.  But for now, if you’re a small-time candidate looking towards 2010, or will be involved in a larger campaign operation, ask yourself: Where are my voters networking and having conversations online?  You don’t always have to rush to the latest tool to connect with them.  Is Tila Tequila in your district?