IP Democracy: Campaigns Flock to Social Networking

AP’s Anick Jesdanun has this piece on how political campaigns are waking up to the power of social networking. It uses as its jumping off point the campaign of Phil Angelides, California’s Democratic candidate for governor, whose daughter created a MySpace profile for her dad which was originally unauthorized but spurred the Angelides team to embrace social networking. Angelides now has 5,000 friends on MySpace.

MySpace claims that 80% of its members are of voting age, a nice pool of hard-to-reach potential voters. MySpace is contemplating the creation of a special section devoted to politicians and social activists while rival Facebook is contemplating offering discounted ad rates to political campaigns and advocacy groups.

The piece also highlights the flip-side of politics and social networking: profiles that are established to tarnish candidates. Angelides’ Republican opponent, incubment governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has no official profiles on MySpace. But he does have some unflattering profiles on MySpace — one of which lists Adolf Hitler as his friend.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 18, 2006 10:26 AM to IP Democracy