Tactic: polling the Facebook way

Written by Mary on May 30, 2008 – 4:35 pm -


logos of the different Facebook groups that MoveOn members can join to express their opinion about the Democratic party’s nomination battle

Description: The progressive group MoveOn wants to know how its members feel about the struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party nomination. Instead of using a tradition poll, they created a series of Facebook groups and asked members to vote by joining the group whose message they most agreed with, ranging from “wake me up when this primary is over” to “Obama: you won! time to focus on McCain” (see graphic above). MoveOn staff will track the number of members who join each group and from these numbers will be able to tell which views are most popular with their members.

Organizer: MoveOn is an influential online progressive group in the US with 3 million members.

Purpose of Action: To gauge the feelings of MoveOn members about the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the contenders for the Democratic party nomination. MoveOn will use this knowledge about its members’ preferences to guide its own actions as an organization. It does not want to promote a policy that its own members don’t support.

Organizing Tools: Facebook

Outcome: About 3,800 MoveOn members have voted since the poll opened two days ago. The winning message so far, with 1,667 members, is “Obama: you won! time to focus on McCain.”

Ease of Replication: It is free to start a group on Facebook and fairly easy too. You just go to the Facebook Groups homepage and then click create a new group. You can create as many groups as you want. Then inform your supporters of the poll via e-mail or a Facebook message and tell them to join the group they most agree with.


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Tactic: Why Don’t Chilean Parties Use Web Tools?

Written by Jorge Jorquera on May 3, 2008 – 2:55 pm -

striaticDescription: Last week El Mercurio (one of the oldest newspapers in Chile) published a report about the use of Web technologies by political parties in the country (original source in Spanish). The article stated that what the parties were using was very very basic and lacks the “social” element. Even though each one of these parties have a website (list here), they don’t apply the latest interactive Web 2.0 technologies.

Organizer: The political parties of Chile

Purpose of Action: To win elections and gain voter support

Organizing tools not used: YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, or blogging

Outcome: The impact of this new situation is uncertain, but if access to the Internet increases and the activities of young voters online continue to increase, we will see a very different electional process in 2009. The fewer the number of parties that understand this, the lower the probability that they will understand the phenomenon of “Politics 2.0″ that is consolidating around the world and may produce very deep changes in the way we understand “Government”.

Ease of Replication: If we look at the political campaigns in the US, and search a bit about the use of this tools, we can see that, for example, Obama has more than 800,000 followers in Facebook and Ms. Clinton has 150,000. In the past presidential elections in France, the Internet was not only important in the campaigns (in fact Nicolas Sarkozy opposed using it to debate with other candidates), but also it allowed to spread the news who was the winner, due to the bloggers who had fresh info that the media couldn’t get at the same time.

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Posted in Americas, Blogs, Social Networks, Tactics, Video | 2 Comments »