Marketing Nirvana

OK, let’s make it two posts in a row. There’s a lot to write about these past few days and one of the topics that I find most fascinating is the intersection of politics & technology. Now granted, I haven’t lived in the USA for all my life and haven’t had a chance to study the intermingling of the two, but this year with the rise of social media, it looks like technology could help mobilize grassroots political campaign much like it did with the Dean Campaign. Here’s an example:

I had a chance to attend an event organized last week by Entrepreneurs for Obama for a panel discussion moderated by Steve Westly. The event started with a video conference with Barack Obama over Yahoo! Messenger, which had serious connectivity issues. Not only was Obama patient about the whole situation, but he also had a great sense of humor about it. He was also quite persistent and insisted on re-logging to the messenger system to say a few final words about his upcoming Bay Area tour. I just thought he handled the situation very well indeed.

The most important question raised on the panel was how effectively social media was being used by the campaign. Joe Rospars, New Media Director at the Obama Campaign, who spoke at the event, actually describes their campaign’s “MySpace experiment” (via Daily Kos):

At the end of the day, this is all new for everyone — this Joe, that Joe, and everyone participating or commenting on it. We’re flying by the seat of our pants, and establishing new ways of doing things every day. We’re going to try new things, and sometimes it’s going to work, and sometimes it’s not going to work. That’s the cost and that’s the risk of experimenting.

Although, initially skeptical of the effectiveness of political campaigns & their participation in online social networks, I was comforted by the evolving demographics. Just ask Jack Flanagan, EVP of comScore Media Metrix:

As social networking sites have become mainstream, the demographic composition of MySpace.com has changed considerably. Last year half of the site’s visitors were at least 25 years old, while today more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors are age 25 or older,” continued Mr. Flanagan. “It will be interesting to monitor the shifts in Facebook’s demographic composition that will undoubtedly occur as a result of the company’s recent decision to open its doors to users of all ages.

Here’s a breakdown of four social networks and the % of their users, ages 25 and above (as of Oct 2006):

MySpace: 68.3%, Facebook: 49.6%, Friendster: 70.8%, Xanga: 53.9%

Despite all this positivity associated with existing social networks’ demographics, the weak link is in tying this user baser to registered voters and fund raising. Once that is done, we may have achieved some progress. Until then, it’d only remain an experiment.

How do you think that can be achieved?