The Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas has this piece today about Democratic candidate John Edwards’ saturation strategy when it comes to social networking. The campaign has a presence on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and the article even mentions two cool companies, blip.tv and 43things.com as venues covered by the candidate.
And, of course, the candidate has his own social networking site, John Edwards One Corps, which claims to have 20,000 members and 1,200 local chapters. But it’s not at all clear just what kind of impact this outreach will have because online social networking is so new.
One “social network analyst” quoted in the article points out that 2004 Democratic candidate Howard Dean, who pioneered the use of the Internet in political organizing, misjudged the importance of local, face-to-face social connections in Iowa. The importation of Internet-recruited volunteers into that all-important state primary resulted in “strangers talking to strangers.”
Still, Edwards, is exploiting the Internet to the hilt, which can’t hurt as long as the old-fashioned methods aren’t ignored. Another presidential contender, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), isn’t up to Edwards’ level of Internet sophistication, but according to TechPresident’s David All, McCain is coming up the learning curve.
He’s reaching out to bloggers in a big way — he even jumped onto a conference call with a group of bloggers yesterday, becoming the first GOP candidate to reach out to the blogosphere in this way.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:48 AM|Comments(0)
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