Can Obama Turn Friends into Voters?

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Joe Rospars, Obama's new-media director, acknowledges that a key value in social networking tools is the ability to help push voters to back up their online support with offline actions and, above all, a vote. In a conversation earlier this year (BusinessWeek.com, 3/5/08), Rospars said the campaign was using social networks to help "raise expectations of what it is to be a supporter." He added: "You need to organize, you need to tell your friends."

Obama isn't the only one with something to prove. MySpace is working to show it has more relevance in the political sphere than others' earlier efforts to get out the elusive youth vote. Last month the company launched a contest with Rock the Vote, a nonprofit foundation that has tried to get out the youth vote since 1990, asking bands on the site to encourage their fans to register to vote. The band with the most registrations got the chance to come to the Democratic National Convention and play a DemROCKracy concert later tonight. The winning band, OTEP, registered at least 523 voters.

Streaming Debates

Critics of Rock the Vote and other music-inspired efforts, such as the "Vote or Die" campaign by rapper Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, say it involves a lot of rocking and T-shirt selling but little voting. The music groups are quick to point to data from The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), showing that an additional 4.6 million young voters turned out in 2004, an 11-percentage-point increase, fueled in part by increased participation among African-American youth. But that year more people came out in general, giving the youth vote far less impact than the hype surrounding it.

MySpace is going beyond music in its get-out-the-vote effort. During the Democratic convention, it will run two Internet cafés enabling attendees to broadcast events and speeches on the Web. Then it's off to the Republican convention, where MySpace will have a smaller presence, due in part to its audience's apparent political leanings.

After the conventions, MySpace will stream the Presidential debates live on a new site, MyDebates.org. Its tools allow users to jump to sections of the debate addressing particular issues, discuss the candidates' positions, and automatically receive updates about candidates' statements on various issues. MySpace is betting that its efforts will brand the site as a leading place for discussing whatever users care about.

"What we really want to do is give our users more tools and opportunities to engage with the things that are important to them," says Nicole Bilodeau, a spokeswoman who is helping to organize MySpace's convention efforts. "For some people it is music, it's art, it's culture. And for other people, it is politics,"

Strong Primary Youth Turnout

There's some early evidence to support that online participation will make a difference this November. Obama already has had success at turning online backers into donors, collecting more than $200 million online through a network of 1.5 million people. Many of those gave after watching Obama's speeches on YouTube (BusinessWeek.com, 6/27/08) and participating in pro-Obama social network groups. (Obama's YouTube videos alone have been watched more than 8 million times, according to Raseij.)

More importantly, Obama got out the online youth vote in the primaries. According to a June CIRCLE report, the youth voter turnout rate (the percentage of voters compared with the population under age 30) rose from 9% in 2000 to 17% this year.

"This primary season the Millennials have gone to the polls in record numbers, showing they are an influential voting bloc in American politics," said CIRCLE Director Peter Levine in a statement. "All key indicators and trends point to a predicted record turnout of young people voting this coming November." Of course, similar predictions about youth voter turnout were made in 2004.

Obama is also utilizing the data and funds supplied by Web supporters to fuel proven traditional methods of getting voters to the polls. The Democrat's campaign organization is using data supplied by users on social networks to decide which supporters to send position e-mails to, which ones to ask to start calling other voters, and which ones to remind of the local polling station.

PDF's Rasiej says that Obama's recent promise to give supporters an early heads-up about his Vice-Presidential pick was a blatant, and perhaps brilliant, effort to expand his phone-number database. The campaign can then call all those users who participate, or text-message them, with the address of the nearest voting booth.

"You cannot get elected in the United States without the Internet," says Rasiej. "However, you can't get elected only using the Internet, either."

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.