For the first time in the history of humanity, 150,000,000 people are CONNECTED in one place! Facebook is more than just hype – every online business and politician needs to know how to use this social platform. In this post I will describe our experience with running a Political Campaign on Facebook. From our experience, Facebook pages tend to experience a Snowball effect once a critical mass of supporters has been obtained.
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The McCain campaign decided to enter the world of Facebook yesterday with the launch of the Straight Talk Express application. So what does the application do? Not much to be honest. All it does is embed the video which I’ve included below. That’s it! It also enables users to invite their friends and provides links to John McCain sites as well but nothing else.

I’m not quite sure why the McCain team decided to launch this application rather than embed the video on a fan page but that’s their decision, not mine! The McCain team is way behind the Obama team on Facebook given that the Barack Obama fan page has now crossed 1 million supporters. The John McCain straight talk express application has added less than 1,000 users so far but then again it just launched yesterday.

The video created by the McCain team is a really well done MTV Cribs style overview of one of the Straight Talk Express buses. I’m not sure how this tells me anything about McCain as a candidate but I definitely learned a little something about his bus driver. Check out the video below and feel free to install the Straight Talk Express application.

A couple of conservative supporters thought they were doing their party a good deed when they went and created the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) 2009 group on Facebook. Well apparently it didn’t work out too well when the creator of the group received the following threatening letter:

Hi Beau,

The chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation has decided to pursue legal action with Facebook to get your CPAC 2009 group removed. Just wanted to let you know because I don’t know if they automatically disable groups during when legal complaints are brought.

Lisa

Rather than choose sides as to whether or not the group is a good idea, what I will say is that it was a dumb idea for the ACU (American Conservative Union) to sue their own supporters. It’s no wonder that left-leaning groups have so much more support on the site …. they aren’t supporting their own people! I recently covered brands that were filing complaints with users that had created their own brand pages.

Sam Huelatt, who had created a Ralph Lauren page, received a letter directly from Ralph Lauren notifying him that they would send him a $200 gift certificate for setting up the page. This is the smart way to play it, not suing your supporters.

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing an increasing number of articles covering political controversy popping up on Facebook. Just the other day I touched on the topic of Facebook being involved in mideast drama as it pertained to Israel and Palestine. Yesterday I saw another article about how debate over the future of Pakistan is taking place on Facebook. During his keynote interview at South by Southwest a couple weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg touched on the issue of political debate on Facebook and how it is becoming a forum for political discussion.

The theory is that Facebook is simply trying to produce a platform that enables participants to communicate more effectively and more easily without taking a position on any issues. I agree that Facebook should stay away from making political stances and as I’ve been discussing more regularly with friends and family, the social web is transforming interpersonal communications worldwide. This transformation is ultimately the democratization and free flow of information.

I believe that providing a forum for this discussion is the best thing that could happen to the world. Ultimately, in countries where people are taught stereotypes and biases about cultures and races, individuals can log on to Facebook and learn more about these individuals for themselves. While it won’t always provide an immediate solution, providing a forum for discussion most definitely avoids people taking to arms and lets the battles get played out in words.

I was going to write about the news about Pakistan debate on Facebook but I think that the real story here is that people are connecting worldwide on an unprecedented scale. While this started years ago with the proliferation of the internet, we are only beginning to witness the power that it has. With powerful translation tools on the horizon I can only imagine how these new tools for communication will break down barriers like never before.

I for one am enthusiastic about the potential for the future as a result of these new technologies. I think it is inevitable that humans will find truth through exposure to other cultures and Facebook is one of the tools that are leading the way in helping us gain more exposure. It’s indeed an exciting time to be alive!

For four hours last night, ABC provided a continuous broadcast of Republican and Democratic debates live from New Hampshire. Late last year we saw the YouTube/CNN debates that enabled YouTube users to present questions directly to the presidential candidates. While filtered, it was the first time that web technology was so tightly integrated with the debates. Whether or not you think YouTube was integrated into the debates effectively it illustrated the ubiquity of the YouTube brand.

Last night, it was not just ABC covering the New Hampshire debates. It was instead ABC and Facebook presented boldly on the stage and on the televised event’s pre-roll. It spoke to the ubiquity of Facebook. A powerful statement. Overall for Facebook, the event appeared to be little more than a statement and a highly active application on their site. At the end of the debates, the program cut to an ABC staff member who gave a summary of how the debates were shaping out on Facebook.

She proceeded to cherry pick random statements that users has submitted and stated that Facebook users wanted to hear more about the economy from each of the candidates. That was it! They cut back to the normal broadcast at which point the announcer paraphrased the ABC staff member about Facebook users wanting to hear more about the economy and continued with the show.

It appeared as though the ABC staff member was experiencing information overload in trying to summarize what the Facebook users were saying. Rightfully so. As Anne Broache points out, there were over 35,000 comments posted by Facebook users. A staggering number that illustrates how the ABC staff had no chance of effectively filtering the content in such a short amount of time.

This was the first time though and when the partnership was first announced, Facebook painted the partnership as more of an experiment then anything else. A good experiment it was. Maybe next time there will be a higher level of integration between Facebook and the debate. For now I think this was a great first step and it was powerful to see Facebook’s name branded on the debates. Do you think this was a good level of integration?

Yesterday I wrote about how the Facebook and ABC News partnership was receiving a lot of negative press. I even called the partnership irrelevant. Soon after I received an e-mail from Facebook’s communications department stating “your posting seemed to talk mainly about content distribution. The partnership is actually about starting and ongoing debate and discussion about the presidential election—both on Facebook with the US Politics application and in a real-world, televised debate on Jan. 5.”

Perhaps I missed some of the details surrounding the partnership but my position still stands: Facebook users don’t want to spend their time on Facebook discussing politics for the most part. I still stand by that position. Today, Facebook began promoting their politics application again via the newsfeed to try to encourage users to become more active. While I think this is a great idea I don’t think it’s going to hold. As always, it is easier to be a pessimist so perhaps this will eventually work.

The funny thing is that yesterday, one of the Facebook corporate communications representatives emphasized the telvised debate coming up on January 5th but I couldn’t find any mention of the debate anywhere on the application. Honestly, I just go to the traditional news sites as well as Memeorandum to keep up to date on what’s going on in politics. Do you think the Facebook politics application will gain any traction?

Last night I posted about ABC News closing a deal with Facebook in which they provide their content free of charge to Facebook users. Today the press responded and the response is overwhelmingly negative. Caroline McCarthy writes:

But ABC News doesn’t seem to have caught onto the fact that Facebook’s user base sees the site as a platform for social recreation, not information consumption. None of the front-runners in the list of most popular third-party applications on the site deal with politics or news–instead, they include Flixster’s movie rating application, Slide’s “Top Friends,” iLike’s music app, and the woefully addicting Scrabulous.

She makes a great point. Facebook users seem to be using the site for recreation. The release about the partnership also fails to mention that the content will be distributed through Facebook’s U.S. Politics application which currently has less than 5,000 active daily users ranking it among the least used applications on Facebook. So while the press release may state that ABC News now has access to Facebook’s more then 52 million users, odds are that ABC News won’t be getting much more exposure.

As far as I can tell, Facebook and ABC News simply used this partnership as a way to generate a little buzz in the press the Monday after Thanksgiving. Aside from that, this is pretty much an insignificant event.

ABC News Homepage

ABC News Video Home

Well, they’ve done it.

The fastest growing Facebook group ever has reached its goal of 1,000,000 members in nine days. I must admit, I joined this group relatively shortly after its creation, coming in at number 22,436. I never would have thought that in just over a week, one million Gen Y’ers would be able to assemble for any cause, let alone in support of a presidential candidate, and apparently neither did anyone else.

This leads me to wonder, though. If a cable television host can rally the support of such a massive number of Facebook users to vote for him in such a brief period of time with no campaign marketing budget and no door-to-door canvassing, why are 40% of this one million not yet registered to vote?. Are we to believe that Gen Y has come to its senses that suffrage is the “reason” why US troops are in Iraq? Does this signify a sudden surge in interest in the 2008 election? Is this Facebook group indicative of next year’s “Get Out The Vote” campaign figures?

Probably not. Diddy’s Vote or Die campaign turned out to be all sizzle and no steak, and Colbert’s presidential aspirations will likely fizzle out by election time. As is evidenced by another Facebook group, “I watch Comedy Central for my news and Fox News for my Comedy”, this politically inactive and seemingly apathetic demographic is just going through the motions of showing their support for a candidate, but then again, no one believed that Colbert could muster this massive outpouring of support in a week.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past week, you have probably heard about the atrocities taking place in Burma. A similar event occurred 19 years ago when 4,000 people were killed in response to pro-democracy uprising. The same thing is happening again and a large number of people on Facebook are organizing worldwide protests in response to the events.

One group, “Support the Monks’ protest in Burma” was adding over 3,000 users an hour at its peak. The group has now attracted over 100,000 individuals and still continues to grow. The group is a central place for the group administrators to distribute news and information regarding protests taking place worldwide today and tomorrow. I went ahead and joined the group but it can definitely use more people. I won’t wax-poetic about the issue given that this isn’t a political blog. If you want to express your support of the Burmese monks, go join the group.

While many of us like to avoid it, politics is a heated topic. There are significant divisions within our country and around the world and with the coming elections politics is going to heat up. A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble had the opportunity to interview Randi Zuckerberg. In the interview Randi discussed her desire to increase the political activity on Facebook. It appears that Randi is holding true to her promise as a Facebook Political Summit has been scheduled for October 9th in Washington, D.C.

There are also an increasing number of applications looking to tap into the political fever. These applications include the:

• Causes application;
• Jena 6 application;
• Election ‘08 application;
• End Poverty application;
• and hundreds more.

While many of us don’t discuss it, politics is something many of us are passionate about. Do you think the younger generation is politically active? How do you think Facebook and politics mesh? Or do they not mesh at all?