As another presidential election rolls into gear, it will be instructional and fascinating to watch how each campaign makes use of social networking systems on the web. In fact, if you’re watching correctly, a major national election can offer a practical course on community engagement — exposing the best guesses of experts on how to galvinize and direct the individual choices and social actions of an entire country.
That’s a useful course for cultural managers, whether they work on the local, regional, state, or national stage.
This time around, expect a whole bunch of energy and cash flowing on-line — videos, photos, blogs, meetup groups, and on and on. Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 was a first indicator of what was to come — raising tons of cash and attention in the virtual world, but eventually falling short in the world in which people actually vote (the infrastructure of Howard Dean’s campaign has now evolved into CivicSpace, a fairly cool social networking web system for social causes).
As a first look, take a gander at Barack Obama’s new social networking site, My.BarackObama.com. It offers lots of opportunities for any supporter to start a blog, build a buddy list, schedule local events, and raise money for the cause.
Imagine if your web site gave your most enthusiastic audience members the same opportunity, or at least encouraged and connected those who already post on-line.
At CivicSpace (http://civicspacelabs.org/) we are hoping to get a lot of local candidates in the 2007 cycle to use this Drupal+CiviCRM combination through our simple web-based service.
This will demonstrate how even the smallest local candidate should be able to deploy community tools of the same caliber as the Presidential candidates.