Politics

 

It was September 2005 and the underdog campaign of Chuck Lesnick, Democratic candidate for president of the Yonkers City Council, was struggling just to stay in touch with its 15 high school-aged volunteers. Then the campaign hired a 28-year-old named Fred Gooltz. By Election Day, Lesnick’s roster of active volunteers had more than tripled to about 50 high school students. And Lesnick eked out a 627-vote victory over his Republican opponent.

           

Gooltz credits the turnaround in Lesnick’s campaign, at least in part, to his use of the social networking Web site MySpace.com. Tens of millions of people, many of them in their teens and 20s, have created personal profiles on this popular site, where users collect and rank friends and post bulletins, personal information, photographs and comments on their own pages and those of their peers. But Gooltz realized that MySpace and similar sites aren’t just for e-socializing, and could also be used as a political tool, a readymade platform to meet, court and motivate young volunteers.

 

“That is such an incredible source to tap into,” Gooltz said. “You do it where these people live. And they’re living online.”

           

So with the help of a few teenage volunteers, Gooltz created a MySpace profile for the Lesnick campaign (He did the same thing on MiGente.com, a similar site aimed at Latinos.) He posted information on where to vote, opposition research, a calendar of campaign events and, because Lesnick’s was largely an anticorruption platform, a quick and dirty history of Yonkers politics. Gooltz tried to adopt the online lexicon of the young; for instance, “later” became “l8r.” He tapped several Lesnick volunteers to collect MySpace friends for the candidate and comment regularly on their pages to make them feel wanted and needed. And he made sure Lesnick’s MySpace friends got involved in the real world, knocking on voters’ doors and coming to campaign events, by playing off their hormonal social needs and desires; for instance, he said he encouraged a teenage volunteer to attend an event by suggesting that a co-ed who he had a crush on would be there.

 

“It’s like it’s been built for it,” Gooltz said of MySpace. “It’s been built to play into all of those fears and that flirting from afar.”

 

Since the Lesnick campaign, Gooltz has taken his political strategy of harnessing the power of social networking sites to several other candidates and causes. He’s now a political consultant for former Sen. John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat who has an information-packed MySpace page and nearly 5,000 online “friends.” Gooltz is also on the steering committee of Drinking Liberally, a left-leaning organization with 170 chapters in 42 states, that has an astounding roster of more than 1 million MySpace friends. “It’s nothing short of reinvigorating our democracy,” Gooltz said of the political e-volution. “And that’s what people are dying for.”

 

Many describe the messaging power of social networking sites like MySpace, MiGente and Facebook.com as viral. “The analogy is to a computer virus,” said Bentley College Professor Christine Williams, who has studied politics and Facebook. “It’s an exponential growth in support for a product, service, or in this case, we’re talking about a political candidate.” Because all of any single MySpace or Facebook user’s friends are displayed on his personal page, making just one new friend gives a politician the opportunity to be seen by that new friend’s dozens, hundreds or thousands of friends.

 

Consider a nonpolitical example of how powerful this can be. On Sept. 5, Facebook introduced a very unpopular “feeds” feature. It was seen by many as too invasive because it immediately alerted users to even the smallest change on any of their friends’ pages – anything from breaking up with a boyfriend to adding a new band to a list of favorite music to changing a profile picture.

 

So someone started a Facebook group called “Students Against the Facebook Feeds.” Via the new feed, the creation of that group appeared on all of the creator’s friends’ pages, and if any of them joined, that fact was subsequently posted on the pages of all their friends, making a whole new set of people instantly aware of its existence. By the end of the day, 30,000 people had joined the group. By late Sept. 7, barely two full days since the group’s creation, its membership was 750,000, or 8 percent of all Facebook users, according to Fred Stutzman, a blogger on social networking sites and a Ph.D. student in information science at the University of North Carolina.

 

But still, politicians are just catching on. According to several dedicated observers of social networking sites, the political migration to MySpace and similar sites is only months old, and was largely spurred by the success this spring of grassroots walkouts against anti-immigration legislation. Many of those demonstrations in Los Angeles, which Stutzman said resulted in 40,000 people walking out of high schools and protesting outside, were organized by students via cell phone text messages and MySpace.

 

“All those people had to do was click a button, and the walkouts were people on the street in civil disobedience,” he said. The ease with which such a massive demonstration was planned and executed showed many politicians that there was power to be found in “viral” communication, says Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of the Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “At that point, the political world paid attention,” she said.

 

But have politicians really figured it out? Big-name Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Edwards and Obama all have sites on MySpace, Facebook, or both. But merely having a presence on MySpace or Facebook isn’t enough to reap political dividends. When politicians simply post the same tired biographies, photos and position papers on social networking sites as they have posted on their main Web sites, they’ll fail to generate passion, or even interest, among young users, Germany said. Instead, she adds, politicians must use their pages to tailor messages to their target audience – in this case, Internet-savvy youngsters; short videos are preferable to lengthy written bios, and active blogs and updated lists of events and appearances also work well.

 

“It might not generate new interest, but when used correctly, the site seems to be a really good tool to get people who are already interested to take action,” she said.

 

Politicians with successful MySpace pages also don’t just try to gather as many friends as possible. Instead, they carefully target potential friends based on those users’ posted interests and allegiances. “Because people are able to write down who their heroes are, what their favorite book is, each MySpace profile has key information, sort of like a key into their psyche as voters,” Gooltz said. It’s important to take the time to understand who these MySpace friends are and to develop a relationship with them before bombarding them with messages and volunteer opportunities.

 

“Usually we don’t meet with someone and yell at each other about what we believe,” Germany said. Internet users expect thoughtful, individual attention, and politicians must discard the one-size-fits-all broadcast strategies when they use MySpace, she said. And even if a politician succeeds in making friends on MySpace, it can be tough to hold the interest of their new friends’ short attention spans.

 

“If you don’t comment your friends and keep them up-to-date, keep reaffirming them as being important friends to you, they’re quickly going to fade away,” Gooltz said. Because of the level of individual attention required to successfully use MySpace for political gain, it’s been smaller, local campaigns that have found success, while national candidates are still searching for a winning strategy, Germany said.

 

She and others also emphasized that a great MySpace page isn’t going to single-handedly win any campaign, large or small. “Everything that we’re doing online is in complete chorus with offline campaign departments,” Gooltz said. “We are inventing nothing new online. All we’re doing is building a similar system for the folks who live online.”

 

Democrats have so far been making better use of social networking sites. And because MySpace is littered with photographs of barely-dressed women and alcohol-consuming minors, Germany said that many conservative Republicans with family values agendas might be choosing to avoid the site. Besides, the Republican National Committee already has a sophisticated get-out-the-vote machine that utilizes the Internet, Germany said, and might not need the MySpace infrastructure as much as Democrats do.

 

While many are quick to laud the political power of social networking sites, it seems that their potential remains somewhat untapped. There’s little to no empirical evidence that they directly caused political action in any 2006 campaign. “The $64,000 question is did it actually make a difference in the election,” Williams said. “We can’t prove that Facebook actually motivated anybody to do anything.” But the possibility of engaging young voters on the Internet has many excited, and Williams said that politicians will find success in communicating with younger demographics on MySpace and Facebook because it means “reaching them on their turf.” Some speak with more lofty idealism. Gooltz said he sees political activism and connectedness on the Internet, and specifically on social networking sites, as the first signs of a new culture of civic engagement that’s “bubbling under the surface of the millennial generation.”