Michael Connery's blog

Obama's Virtual Ad-Buy and the Gamer Constituency

2008-10-15T13:49:20-04:00

As Game Politics broke last week, and Gigaom confirmed yesterday, Barack Obama is buying in-game advertising on X-box Live. The ads are photo-realistic and announce the start of early voting and promote Vote for Change, Obama's one-stop-shop for registration and voting information.

So far, the ads are appearing in the following games:

Burnout Paradise
Madden 09
Nascar 09
NBA Live 08
Need for Speed Carbon
Need for Speed Prostreet
NFL on Tour
NHL 09
Skate

According to the Seattle Times, the ads were sold by Massive, a Microsoft-owned ad agency (Microsoft makes the X-box, for the non-gamers here). The ads are also highly targeted and are only visible to gamers in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.

There's no word as to how much these ads are costing or whether or not the Obama campaign pursued similar deals with PlayStation or Nintendo. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday trying to get someone at the Obama campaign to answer some basic questions, but ran into the PR wall. Here's all that the campaign is saying:

"Voters have a clear choice between Barack Obama and the change we need, or John McCain and more of the same failed Bush policies. These ads will help us expand the reach of VoteforChange.com, so that more people can use this easy tool to find their early vote location and make sure their voice is heard."

Over at ePolitics, Colin Delaney is skeptical about the efficacy of such ads:

Now let’s be realistic: these ads are in the middle of a racing game and are going to blow right by players, though they must be up long enough to register if people are going to bother paying for them. And they’re aimed at a shiftless-young-male demographic notoriously resistant to political messages, unless delivered by the Swedish Bikini Team. But thinking about it, the Obamans have probably bought about as many battleground-state TV commercials as they possibly could by now, so why not try using games to try to break through? What do you possibly risk? They certainly have the cash.

More broadly, this tactic reminded me of what folks from the abortive Mark Warner presidential campaign said a couple of years ago about his appearance in Second Life: very few people actually saw Warner there, but many more talked about it, and they talked about it on tech sites and gaming sites that are normally tough to break into. In the case of Obama’s gaming ads, besides the usual political suspects, they’ve now been covered in tech blogs, gaming sites AND car sites like this one. Multiplier effect!

I'm much more optimistic about this. Yes, it's true, that racing games like Burnout Paradise and Grand Turismo might not make the best vehicles for these ads, but sporting games offer much less hectic game play where ads could be more visible. Imagine little cartoon Obama ads in Wii tennis. Or imagine playing Gears of War II and seeing a faded-out, ravaged Shepard Fairey poster of Obama on the wall of a shelled-out building. . .

I also grate against the Second Life comparison. I was never on the Second Life bandwagon for a lot of reasons - janky interface, absolutely nothing interesting to do except attack people with penises, and lack of critical mass of users being some of the biggest. Above all, Second Life was a dead end. You could walk around a virtual campaign office, but you couldn't do anything. You had to leave Second Life if you wanted to take action. None of these are the case with XBox Live.

With users numbering in the millions, XBox Live certainly has the critical mass of active users to make such advertising attractive. In comparison, Second Life never had more than a few thousand active users at any given time. And thanks to their partnership with Rock the Vote, it's possible for any XBox Live user to actually start the registration process right on their XBox. As more states like California and Arizona pass laws allowing complete online voter registration, it's going to be possible to go from seeing one of these in-game ads to registering to vote before you put down the controller for the night.

The opportunities for reaching an audience and inspiring action are even greater on a platform like Nintendo Wii, which has a much more social element to its games than PlayStation or XBox. Imagine hosting a dinner party and busting out the Wii to play some tennis or Dance Dance Revolution, and seeing an in-game ad. We know that peer to peer is the surest way to get someone to register and then vote. So maybe one person at the party then asks if everyone is registered to vote. Those who aren't face some intense peer pressure, and with online registration through the console, everyone can register to vote right then and there. We aren't too far off from being able to do that and this is one of the first steps towards getting there.

Most of all, what I like about this ad buy, is that it shows some cultural respect for a growing and important constituency: gamers.

We know that all the stereotypes about gamers are false. Video games don't cause violence, and violence among youth has declined since the advent of games like Mortal Kombat and Halo. We know that young gamers are not civically challenged introverts, but are just as likely to vote as any other young person. And we know that most gamers aren't even teenagers. By PEW's reckoning, 35% of adults play video games, and the average age of a gamer is 33 years old.

Despite that, the Democratic Party of the last 15 years is rife with politicians who have used gamers and violent video games as their own personal Sista Souljah to navigate the culture war and appeal to "the center." It is in part thanks to Holy Joe Lieberman's crusades against video games, and the well-intentioned but misguided efforts of Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton to regulate video games, that gamers are now an oft-maligned constituency in America, more likely associated with Columbine than with civic participation.

In reality, gamers are be a valuable, and sizeable, constituency to be courted by politicians on both sides of the aisle. What the Obama campaign is doing with this ad-buy is reaching out a hand to recognize gamers as an important piece of American culture and a group that needs - and deserves - to be brought into the public debate. That's what I love most about this move by the Obama campaign. It shows a cultural fluency with 21st Century American life that most politicians lack, and a willingness to reach out to all Americans in the places they live and socialize. I can't wait until the campaign is over and we can get some real data on what this cost and how effective it was. I think this is just scratching the surface of something that will grow to become a common occurrence in politics.

CountMore - Strategic Battleground Voting for Students

2008-09-22T11:33:29-04:00

As we come up on voter registration deadlines, a lot of students may be asking themselves, "where should I vote?" Unlike the rest of us, college students have the luxury of deciding whether they would prefer to vote at school or in their home states.

As we all know, not all states are created equally in our elections. Battleground states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Ohio will carry much more weight in deciding the outcome of this election than "safe" red or blue states like New York, California, or Utah. In cases where a student lives in a safe state but attends school in a swing state, or vice-versa, deciding where to cast a ballot is a no-brainer: pick the swing state. But what if you have a choice between two different battleground states? In that instance, it's a little harder to know what to do.

A new website - CountMore - hopes to help students make that choice.

Created by Front Seat, a civic software company out of Seattle, CountMore offers a simple solution to help students decide where best to cast their ballot. All the student needs to do is go to the CountMore website and select their home state and school state from two drop down menus. The site's algorithm then uses previous election results, current polling data, and the number of electoral votes in play to rank the importance of each state and determine where the student's ballot can have the greatest impact.

Here's a closer look at how CountMore makes those decisions:

How do we decide which states count more? First, we categorize states into the following tiers:

Critical Tipping Point State: States that the non-partisan polling website FiveThirtyEight.com identifies as "Tipping Point States" that are more than 40% likely to tip the election. These states are currently: Ohio and Colorado

Tipping Point State: States that the non-partisan polling website FiveThirtyEight.com identifies as "Tipping Point States" that are more than 10% likely to tip the election. These states are currently:Virginia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida.

Margin < 5%: States where pollster.com is reporting less than 5% polling difference or the 2004 election margin was less than than 5%. These states are currently: Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.

Margin < 10%: States where pollster.com is reporting less than 10% polling difference or the 2004 election margin was less than than 10%. These states are currently: Arkansas, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Washington.

All other states.

Then, our algorithm compares the two states and recommends the state in the highest tier. In the case of a tie, we declare a toss up.

Note: Algorithm data was last sampled on 9/19/2008 and may change over time.

This is not the first site to attempt to optimize the effectiveness of people's ballots. In 2000, websites like Nader Trader, VoteSwap and VoteExchange attempted to let people in "safe" states voting for Gore swap their votes with citizens in battleground states voting for Nader. That way, Gore could rack up votes in swing states that would have otherwise gone to Nader, and Nader could shoot for his 5% margin (which would have guaranteed the Green Party federal funds in the next election) through votes in dark red and dark blue states that would not influence the election's outcome.

While such sites were not illegal in 2000, many claimed they were unethical. For students and organizers holding such qualms about CountMore, the group's website has compiled an extensive FAQ running down the merits and ethics of strategic voting, as well as general questions students may have about voting deadlines and registration problems in general (such as those plaguing Virginia students).

Obviously the vote trading sites of 2000 weren't enough to tip the election in Florida, and it's not at all clear that CountMore could be any more effective. To do so would require massive exposure in a very short amount of time (voter registration deadlines are rapidly approaching). But in an election season in which young voters are paying and unprecedented amount of attention, it's not at all improbable that CountMore could, at the very least, help some of those young voters make a more informed choice about how most effectively to wield their vote on November 4th.

Cross-posted from Future Majority.

The Significance of the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge

2008-02-04T12:56:44-05:00

Update: The results of the contest are still subject to verification by the contest moderators and will be announced in about a month.

Matt Browner-Hamlin reminds me that on Friday the FaceBook Causes Giving Challenge came to a close, with Love Without Boundaries securing the $50,000 grand prize. The competition raised thousands of dollars for over a dozen different non-profit organizations and pioneered a new best practice for Foundations looking to assist a wide range of organizations with more than a one-time cash infusion.

Sponsored by what looks to be a $250,000 grant from the Case Foundation, and run by Philotic Inc, the company that created the Causes Application, the contest created a highly competitive environment that encouraged small non-profit organizations to raise money and build a large, small-dollar donor lists. The Giving Challenge accomplished this through a two-stage structure.

The first stage was a series of daily contests beginning on December 14th and ending on February 1st. Each day, all participating non-profits engaged in a 24 hour competition to raise not the most money from their members, but rather to raise money from the largest number of unique donors. An organization with 100 donors would beat an organization with 90 donors for that 24 hour time period regardless of the total dollar amount raised. The winner for each 24 hour period received a $1000 prize.

This structure spurred many organizations to pick specific days and use them as rallying points for their memberships. The Case Foundation distributed $50,000 in this first stage of the competition.

The second stage looked at the total amount of donors for the full 50 days of the competition. The organization with the largest unique donor list won the $50,000 grand prize. The second and third place organizations each received $25,000. The next 10 highest each received $10,000.

The contest is significant for a number of reasons, but most exciting is the way that it is spurring many small non-profits to build a donor network. It accomplished this by creating an environment in which organizations had a chance to win a not-insignificant chunk of their yearly budget, and by keeping the threshold for meaningful participation very low (a $10 dollar donation helps just as much as a $100 donation, democratizing the process).

Matt Browner-Hamlin, who used to work for Students for a Free Tibet, one of the runners-up, explains:

The Tibetan Freedom Movement, SFT’s cause for the giving challenge, has over 4,750 members. 2,190 of those members have donated at least once, and counting. Since I took the screen cap five minutes ago, 150 more people have donated in support of Tibetan freedom. That is one of the highest members to donors conversation rates on Facebook causes. Over the last 49 days, SFT has raised over $60,000 through the challenge, including enough individual donations in 24 hour periods to win nine days.

Students for a Free Tibet is not a big organization. When I worked there, only four other people were on staff in the New York headquarters (now there are six staffers in HQ). In my years, the annual budget was around $350,000; it was closer to $400,000 this year. If SFT wins out in the challenge, they will likely have raised over 25% of their budget in 50 days, a truly incredible output for such a small organization. By contrast, LWB had a budget of $1.2 million last year, four times larger than SFT.

Matt also notes that the contest spurred a lot of creativity on the part of SFT in how they engaged their members, including happy hour events with WiFi and laptops set up, and members pushing the competition out to their family and social networks.

He also correctly notes that only two organizations made a highly-committed and serious run at the grand prize - SFT and Love Without Borders, both of which amassed over 4,500 donors. I'm not so quick, however, to dismiss the other participants and the impact this competition had on their own bottom lines.

The League of Young Voters, for instance, made a push only a few times to win the daily prize. They managed to capture that title twice, netting $2000, and their efforts earned them a spot in the $10,000 prize range. In addition, they raised $13,696 from 786 members. So all told, they raised just over $25,000. That's not an insignificant number for them, and that is in addition to the list they built, which they may can tap again in the future with targeted fundraising campaigns (i.e. "we need to raise X amount in X weeks to fund a staffer in Ohio for 2008).

I'm not privy to the budgets of the other participating organizations, but I imagine that this competition provided both valuable funds and list-building to all of them. The Case Foundation, it appears, has discovered a highly efficient structure to provide what amounts to a de facto matching grant to at least a dozen organizations at once. More incredibly, it created a system that moves all of those organizations closer to sustainability. That's a significant achievement, and one that begins to make good on the promise that many young people and poli-tech enthusiasts saw in the FaceBook Causes application when it first launched.

Most pertinent to youth organizers, this contest and any future iterations provides a model for organizational development that can at least begin overcome one of the most significant hurdles to sustainable youth organizing - building a donor base out of a young membership with huge amounts of disposable income, but very little willingness to spend it on political/activist causes. Very impressive all around, and certainly something to watch in the future.

MTV/MySpace Postmortem: Change vs. Experience vs. Ron Paul

2008-02-03T15:12:31-05:00

Last night, four Presidential candidates participated in the final MTV/MySpace Candidate Dialogue. Dubbed "Closing Arguments," the event, which ran almost two hours, was a final chance for the candidates to make their arguments to young voters, who have played an influential role in the nominating process thus far.

The event was not very interesting in what it told us about the candidates - most viewers in the live audience had already decided which candidate would receive their ballot, and the candidates themselves said nothing new. Last night's event was interesting in that it revealed a new battleground for online organizing that will surely come into play during the general election.

When I arrived at the event at MTV studios in Times Square, a rally in support of Sen. Obama was already in progress. The Obama camp placed attendance somewhere around 300. Supporters were also there for Hillary and Ron Paul, though their numbers were much more modest. This wasn't all that unexpected. Obama has the most youth support by far, and he's been able to organize his supporters quite effectively on the ground.

The surprises came during the online polling when Ron Paul took his turn (all online polling results below):

I've long noted that the candidate dialogues were the most interactive events on the campaign trail, and I've been excited about the possibility that MTV and MySpace could create a feedback loop between the candidates and the online audience that would keep the candidates more honest in their answers and cut down on speculation among the punditry by providing a real-time glimpse into what young voters were thinking about the campaigns.

This didn't happen in previous Dialogues, where young voters overwhelmingly agreed with the answers provided by Senators Obama, Edwards, and McCain. My hope was that this feedback loop would emerge during last night's Q&A with one of the Republican candidates, who generally have views that contrast greatly with those of young voters.

Instead of that feedback loop, what I saw was a tactical assault by Ron Paul supporters to "win" the debate for their candidate. In question after question, Ron Paul scored much higher than I would have expected, and the Democratic candidates scored far lower than I thought possible.

For example, Darfur has long been a high priority with young voters, who are also multilateralists, and questions about the genocide have come up in almost all of the previous dialogues. When asked a question about Darfur, Dr. Paul laid out a non-interventionist plan for handling the crisis in which he equated direct involvement in solving the Darfur crisis to our intervention in Iraq. I expected Paul's answer to invoke a backlash in the online voting. Instead, he garnered a startling 61 percent support.

This level of support continued. 76 percent supported his views on how the country should have responded to 9/11. 78 percent supported his views on energy independence. 81 percent supported his foreign policy ideas, and fully half declared their intention to vote for Rep. Paul on Tuesday. To be sure, Ron Paul has some youth support, but this was above and beyond any support he's received thus far. Even in the Republican contests Huckabee, Romney and McCain have repeatedly done better among young conservative voters than Ron Paul.

These results were startling, but perhaps not unexpected. Ron Paul's support has mostly manifested itself on the internet, where he dominates social news websites like Digg and Reddit. This tech savvy was on display once again last night, and the Paulites were not content to limit their activity to boosting their candidate. They also worked to drag down his opponents.

This was confirmed when the Democrats - Obama and Clinton - had their turn. Sen. Obama scored just above or below 50 percent support on almost every question asked of him. This was far different from his first appearance on MTV, when he typically scored upwards of 75% support. Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post, the moderator in charge of the online component of the debate tried to explain Obama's low-marks as a manifestation of young voters desire for "experience" over the Senator's message of "change," but polling for Clinton not ten minutes later put the lie to that analysis. Sen. Clinton rarely scored higher than 25 or 30 percent support, despite the fact that younger people are participating in the Democratic primaries in far greater numbers than the GOP contests.

Last night, Obama's supporters showed their strength outside the venue with as they rallied for their candidate, but Ron Paul's supporters were the real winners last night. Yet again they were the first to break new ground in another online venue. Unlike the other campaigns, Paul's supporters figured out that the interactivity of the MySpace/MTV dialogues was a two way street; it could keep candidates accountable, but it could also be used by supporters to influence the kinds of questions their candidate received and how his performance was reported. Pauls supporters made last night's event another battleground for their online campaign, and gave their long-shot candidate another feather in his cap (even if they probably didn't improve his chances of winning the nomination).

This has implications beyond Super Tuesday. Due to the success of these events, MTV and MySpace will likely engage the eventually nominees for both parties next fall. Whoever those nominees are, if they are smart, they will learn last night's lesson and organizer their supporters accordingly.

Finally, we've spent a lot of time opining about these MTV/MySpace Dialogues, but what do young voters themselves think of the format? I talked to four of last nights attendees to get their thoughts:

Live Blog from the Final MTV/MySpace Dialogue

2008-02-02T17:56:47-05:00

I'm at MTV studios in NYC to live blog the final broadcast in the MTV/MySpace Candidate Dialogues. Tonight's event, "Closing Arguments," is billed as a "Super Dialogue" because it will feature 4 candidates participating via satellite.

I'm in a press room a few yards from the studio, which is crammed full of kids and has no real seating (thus has no good vantages from which to live-blog).

So far, these have been some of the most interactive events on the campaign trail. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain that level of interactivity and connection when dealing with four candidates instead of one, and when the candidates are beaming in via satellite instead of sitting in the same room with the moderators and questioners.

The program will air:

Broadcast live on MTV, MTV2 and MTV Tr3ìs, with highlights on college network mtvU
Streamed live online via MySpace (www.myspace.com/election2008) and MTV’s www.ChooseOrLose.com
Distributed live to the Associated Press Online Video Network, encompassing more than 1,800 media sites with an aggregate reach of 61 million unique visitors – and nearly 600 local media outlets in Super Tuesday states
Streamed live on mobile devices via MTV Mobile
Broadcast live on radio via XM Satellite Radio, MTV and AP Radio
Translated into Spanish and broadcast on ImpreMedia’s LaVibra (www.lavibra.com/candidatos)
Live studio audience participating at MTV’s Times Square studio

It should get started in about five minutes. Interesting to note is that there is a fairly large Obama rally going on outside the event as we speak. I can' hear them chanting "fired up, ready to go" and "USA, Obama all the way" outside in Times Square. I'll have some video of that up shortly.

Are you watching?

Update - Gideon Yago asked the audience how many had already made their candidate choice. Most of them raised their hands. Very few undecideds in the audience.

Update - Props to Sway and Gideon who are giving the youth vote its due for turning out.

Update: Huckabe just got killed in the first question about bringing change to Washington. 68% don't agree with his answer to at least some extent. This will be interesting. Young People are very progressive and I feel like McCain got a bit of a pass when he participated in a previous dialogue. Mostly due to his reputation as an independent. Will the Republicans fare so well tonight? And how will Clinton do in such a spontaneous, interactive forum?

Update: Hmmm....my browser just crashed twice. I don't know if it's the MySpace/Impact streaming or my Flip Video camera, which I'm trying to use to upload some videos of the rally outside. So I missed some of Huckabee's responses. The Flektor widget says people still aren't buying his answers though.

Update: Here's a look at the studio from the inside. My camera doesn't like the lights.

Update: Huckabee's gaining some ground. People like his fair tax the more he talks about it. IT could also be a reaction to his comments about immigrants and the stimulus package. This was also something we saw with McCain. The more he talked, the more ground he gained in support from the online (voting) audience.

Update Huckabee is making his closing arguments. First a joke about Colbert than another about Chuck Norris. His serious answer is executive experience as a governor. Looks like he gained some ground. He's got 26% who are now more likely to vote for him,and his overall negatives dropped to 61%.

Ron Paul

First question is about Darfur. He's equating intervention in Darfur to intervention in Iraq. I'm going to guess that won't go over well with young voters who are hugely concerned about Darfur. Slamming the UN won't help either. Young voters are multilateralists/internationalists.

Update: Wow, I blew that call. Flektor voting says over 60% of young voters trust Ron Paul to solve the issues in Darfur. That makes no sense to me. Could the Paulites be spamming the MySpace/Flektor voting? Entirely possible.

Update: Paul is having some technical difficulties.

Update: Why do young people overwhelmingly support Democrats? Because the Republicans need to be punished. There is some truth to that, I think. Young voters are more progressive in their values, but the Democrats don't always live up to those values. At this point, there is still a significant population of young voters that are more against the GOP than for the Democrats.

Paul is also talking about how he's pulling in young voters, which is true to a limited extent. The GOP youth vote has been split depending on the state.

Update: Paul says that the Republican Party is shooting itself in teh foot by failing to reach out to youth. Also points out the retirements by GOP members in congress, and how the GOP ignores his youth support.

Update: Foreign policy question - management of policy, not management of wars. Non intervention is not isolation. Also, the Obama chanting outside has not let up for one second in the 45 minutes this has been going on.

Update: Paul's closing arguments: Young voters will get their ass kicked by our current economic policies. Government has failed. Vote for Ron Paul.

Final Flektor for Paul - Very positive, but Chris Cilliza points out that the Paulites probably spammed the poll.

Barack Obama

How does your life experience and multicultural background help you as President. Shorter Barack - I bring people together; My grandmother lives in Africa.

Update: Most soldiers are young and from communties of color. Obama responds that service is noble, troops need to be treated properly (GI Bill benefits, don't overtax the reserve). Also mentions $4000 tuition credit per year for students who participate in a national/community service program.

Update: 45% weren't buying Obama's answer to a question on the drat. I thought he dodged it as well (no pun intended). Cilizza is following up about differences between Clinton and he on foreign policy. Obama is talking about the NIE and his superior judgement before the fact in Iraq.

Update: Only 51% trust Obama on foreign policy????? Are the Paulites sticking around and driving up Democratic negative responses?

Update: Civil Unions - supports civil unions and full equal rights as married couples, but NOT full recognition of gay marriage.

Update: There's an AP reporter in the crowd who they are letting ask question. That's weird. Shouldn't the limited time be available only to young voters? This is kinda like Grover Norquist being in the YouTube debate. To top it off, the AP reporter asked a ridiculous "Gotcha" question - why, as potentially the first women President, does Sen. Clinton's campaign not represent change?

Update: Obama's answer on gay marriage gets another 50/50 split in the voting. These are well below his response ratings from his previous MTV/MySpace appearance. The Paulites have to be organizing to drive down up negative responses. If so, we'll probably see this for Hillary as well.

Update: "How will you fix the economy?" Long term adn short term problems. Need to prevent further home forclosures in the short term to stabilize the housing market. Need short-term stimulus for those who are unemployed and making less than $75k. Longterm, need to end huge CEO payouts, fairer tax code, make colleg more affordable, early childhood education, higher teacher pay, and invest in clean energy and green jobs.

Update: He's making his closing arguments and getting his final evaluation with the Flektor voting widget. Looks like the man who's getting upwards of 60% of all youth support in the primaries only got 48% of support in the final poll. At a time when his popularity nationwide is at a high. 44% say they will vote for someone else. I'm really going to say it's the Ron Paul supporters.

Cilizza thinks that voters just want experience and these results speak to that concern. I'm not buying it. We'll see how well Hillary Clinton does next.

Hillary Clinton

Clinton is running late . . .

Update: 80% don't think that Clinton has reached out to young voters.

Update: Wants to index Pell Grants to inflation. Wants to give money in exchange for service and go back to direct government lending instead of corporate loans with high interest rates. Wants to let people who do public service jobs get debt forgiveness. Wants to make college a binding contract that locks in tuition rates for each student.

Update: 63% disagree with Clinton's education policies. I think Cilizza is wrong. It's not Change vs. Experience in these polls, it's Ron Paul supporters vs. everyone else.

Update: Pork barrel funding - $2billion in NY on Clinton's watch - how do you reconcile that with a need for change? It's an interesting question - if you exploit special interests and funnel money w/o accountability, how is that a change agenda? Clinton says there is no contradiction. That her pork spending created jobs for her constituents. That there is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and she'll do it the right way.

Update: "Why can't she admit that her original Iraq vote was wrong?" She's evading and talking about the evidence they had before the war and about how Bush botched the pre- and post-war execution. So basically, she doesn't think she was wrong. The audience agrees. 78% are either not buying it or extremely skeptical.

Update: Clinton as the new Giuliani? She just invoked 9/11 as justification for her votes.

Update: How will she bring Dems and Repubs together and end the Red/Blue divide? She points to her victory in New York.

Maybe it's my own reaction to Clinton, who I don't necessarily like as a campaigner (though would vote for as a candidate), but it feels like she's filibustering the questions and really working to get in other points she wants to make. More so than the other candidates.

Now she's pulling a Kucinich and plugging another event of hers on TV on Monday.

Final Thoughts: 72% are now less likely or definitely won't vote for Clinton. Summing up this event: Online voters don't want experience or change. They want Ron Paul.

Clinton, Huckabee Present Closing Arguments in Latest MTV/MySpace Dialogue

2008-01-28T17:10:12-05:00

This afternoon, MTV announced that on Saturday, February 2nd, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee will both participate in the ongoing MTV/MySpace Candidate Dialogues. Billed as a "Super-Dialogue," the event will offer any candidate polling with at least 10% support to address the MTV/MySpace audience, however only Clinton and Huckabe have accepted thus far.

If you've read my previous pieces on these candidate dialogues, then you know I think they are the most impressive use of the social web this cycle in creating real interaction between the public and the candidates. Their use of live-polling, unscripted questions, and on-line audience feedback represent the most dynamic public forum on the campaign trail. They are to the much-touted CNN/YouTube forums what CNN/YouTube is to traditional broadcast debates.

Originally, MTV and MySpace planned to air individual dialogues with all the candidates on the trail before the Iowa Caucus. That didn't work as planned, and only John McCain, John Edwards, and Barack Obama participated before the Hawkeye state cast their votes. Now, with February 5th - Super (Fat) Tuesday - approaching, Clinton and Huckabee will get their chance to address the nation's young voters.

Clinton is looking to eat away at Obama's base, as she did in New Hampshire. If she can capture enough of the youth vote, she could cripple Obama in the race for delegates. Huckabee, who won the youth vote in evangelical-heavy Iowa and South Carolina, is looking to do much the same: keep up his lead among young evangelicals, and prevent McCain or Romney from gaining ground among youth.

The program will air:

Broadcast live on MTV, MTV2 and MTV Tr3ìs, with highlights on college network mtvU
Streamed live online via MySpace (www.myspace.com/election2008) and MTV’s www.ChooseOrLose.com
Distributed live to the Associated Press Online Video Network, encompassing more than 1,800 media sites with an aggregate reach of 61 million unique visitors – and nearly 600 local media outlets in Super Tuesday states
Streamed live on mobile devices via MTV Mobile
Broadcast live on radio via XM Satellite Radio, MTV and AP Radio
Translated into Spanish and broadcast on ImpreMedia’s LaVibra (www.lavibra.com/candidatos)
Live studio audience participating at MTV’s Times Square studio

The event will be here in NYC, so (assuming there is WiFi) I'll be live-blogging from the studio audience.

Fear and Vlogging on the Campaign Trail, 2008?

2007-12-20T13:53:26-05:00

This morning, MTV dived into citizen journalism on the campaign trail with the launch of Street Team '08, the 51 member blogger/vlogger press corps which I've reported on in the past. Using a $700k grant from the Knight Foundation, which is working to promote new forms of news gathering and reporting, MTV has equipped 51 young citizen journalists - one from each state and the District of Columbia - with video cameras, computers, flash drives; all the equipment they need to blog and vlog the campaign trail for the next 11 months.

From the press release:

“Street Team ‘08” members represent every aspect of today’s youth audience – from seasoned student newspaper journalists to documentary filmmakers, the children of once-illegal immigrants to community organizers. They are conservative, liberal, from big cities and small towns. The tie that binds them all is a passion for politics and a yearning to amplify the youth voice during this pivotal election. All of the “Street Team ’08” correspondents will begin reporting early next month, after an intensive MTV News orientation in New York City.

Reporters are required to file video news stories with MTV on a weekly basis. These stories will be specific to their home states, and will be distributed primarily through the Associated Press’ Online Video Network and Think MTV, the corporation's activist social network, where all 51 reporters have home pages (for a full listing of URLs, see below). At the editorial discretion of MTV, some stories will be rebroadcast to the reported 88 million subscribers of MTV, MTV2, mtvU and MTV Tr3ìs.

Citizen journalism has been a hot topic in recent years. In 2005, Al Gore stepped into the field prominently with the launch of Current TV, a cable news network where all content is generated by the users, and many editorial decisions are also outsourced to the viewing community. More recently, new ventures like Assignment Zero and Off the Bus have tried to harness in varying ways the power of crowds/regular people to provide reporting that is equal to or better than that provided by the mainstream media. This has met with varying degrees of success thus far. Street Team '08 offers a lot of exciting possibilities for MTV to step into that space and give regular people a chance to change the debate with a younger, and more local, perspective.

These vloggers will essentially be their own editors, reporting on the local political stories they care about, with total authority over their work. That's a big step for a corporation like MTV that, until recently, was more widely known for broadcast-era programs like PSAs and news specials. I don't expect to see those programs vanish, but clearly MTV is aware that a shift is happening in media, and they are working to position themselves to lead, or at least not get left behind.

Now, before I go all techno-utopian on you, let's keep things in perspective. These content distribution deals will give the 51 vloggers and their stories a great deal of exposure, as will, presumably, the fact that their work will be not only embeddable, but local and specific (read: valuable to state-level bloggers and youth orgs). But in the end, MTV isn't ceding all control. They are still the gatekeeper to the 88 million domestic viewers of their 4 cable channels, and what type of content gets moved up to that next level is a big question mark. Will it be safe, non-controversial, platitudinous content? Or will it be diverse, controversial, and thought-provoking? The vloggers supposedly come from a wide array of ideological viewpoints. Can MTV distribute such wildly contrasting world-views on their cable channels in a way that is inspiring and exciting? Or will content pulled up to the network be least-common-denominator material designed to play it safe and protect the ratings? Will the final results be more Hunter S. Thompson or David Broder?

On this I'm willing to give MTV the benefit of the doubt. Their work with MySpace on the candidate forums has been impeccable, and as I'm personally acquainted with three of the vloggers (OR, NE, MA), I'm hopeful for the best. I expect their reports to be hard-hitting, and at this point have no reason to doubt that the other 48 candidates will be any different. Only time will tell.

There is one other distribution channel that will be open to all vloggers without the editorial control of MTV - mobile media. It's not quite clear yet how mobile distribution will work (can you subscribe to one vlogger at a time? All at once? How exactly is content delivered?), but the press materials sent out by MTV mark it as one of the primary distribution channels and make no mention of MTV exercising editorial control over mobile distribution.

Personally, I'm somewhat skeptical that as a country we're ready for high-quality content delivery on mobile phones. The hardware, service, and contracts that most users are subject to are still prohibitive of such content distribution on a massive scale, especially compared to other countries where service is better and cheaper, and more people own devices with more capabilities. But more importantly, I don't know that user habits are there yet to support such content delivery as more than an extremely niche product. Maybe the usage habits of tweens are radically different from that of teh general population, and even the early-adopter population, but I don't see a lot of people watching video on their cell phones as of yet. I don't doubt that mobile content distribution like this is coming, but I don't think that 2008 is going to be its break-out year. Maybe in 2010 when a significant number of people have iPhones or iPhone-like devices.

At the very least, it will be very interesting to see how MTV fares in this strategy. If anyone has the ear of the demographic most likely to exploit such technology, it's MTV, and their findings come November will likely be a leading indicator on what we can expect in the near future for mobile content delivery in politics.

Taking a step back to look at the larger picture, I have to wonder if this is MTV making a move toward a more general adoption of the content model pioneered by Current TV. Perhaps not for all their programming (it would be hard to ditch the ratings and/or replicate the production of MTV's reality TV series), then at least for the majority of their news programs. If Street Team '08 is successful, MTV could conceivably expand on the program. If the vloggers caught on and gained an audience, I could see MTV quickly opening this up to all audience members and implementing a pay/rating system similar to that employed by Al Gore's user-content driven cable channel. MTV already has a larger audience (88 million compared to Current's 51 million), and with a lower spot on the dial and a much larger brand name, MTV could very easily beat Current at its own game if it was willing to cede even more control to the users. The way MTV has been embracing social media this year, I don't know that such a scenario is all that far fetched.

As I've reported before, MTV is really stepping up its game this year. Their candidate forums are clearly one of the best innovations this cycle in using social media to improve upon what is still essentially a broadcast politics event. The launch of Stret Team '08 seems like another step in the right direction for them, and it's hard to doubt that at least in the youth political space, MTV is working hard (and perhaps succeeding) at recapturing the political relevance they held after their initial parnership with Rock the Vote in 1992.

State	Name	Homepage
AK	Dani Carlson	http://think.mtv.com/danicarlson/
AL	David Whiteside	http://think.mtv.com/David_Whiteside/
AR	Patrick Kennedy	http://think.mtv.com/PatrickKennedy/
AZ	Nicole Fagin	http://think.mtv.com/nicolefagin/
CA	Carl Brown	http://think.mtv.com/CorduroyNews/
CO	Trevor Martin	http://think.mtv.com/Trevino180/
CT	Megan Budnick	http://think.mtv.com/MeganMinus/
DC	Erica Anderson	http://think.mtv.com/EricaAmerica/
DE	Stephanie Woods	http://think.mtv.com/StrongAllAlongStephanie/
FL	Anthony Wojtkowiak	http://think.mtv.com/mediaforchange/
GA	Shelby Highsmith	http://think.mtv.com/shelbinator/
HI	Angela Wood	http://think.mtv.com/angelawood/
IA	Nathan Stienstra	http://think.mtv.com/NathanLeigh/
ID	Brian Rich	http://think.mtv.com/BrianTRich/
IL	Jacqueline Ingles	http://think.mtv.com/Jingles/
IN	Whitney Allen	www.think.mtv.com/whallen
KS	Alex Parker	http://think.mtv.com/AlexParker/
KY	Lauren Snowden	http://think.mtv.com/blueinthebluegrass/
LA	Phillip Rollins	http://think.mtv.com/prollins/
MA	Kyle de Beausset	http://think.mtv.com/kyledeb_Think/
MD	Kristen Teraila	http://think.mtv.com/KTeraila/
ME	Jaime McLeod	http://think.mtv.com/jmcleod76/
MI	Nadir Omowale	http://think.mtv.com/Nadir/
MN	Carissa Jackson	http://think.mtv.com/CarissaJ/
MO	Steven Smith	http://think.mtv.com/theroyale/
MS	Haley Crum	http://think.mtv.com/hacrum/
MT	K'Lynn Sloan	http://think.mtv.com/KLynn_MT/
NC	Carla Babb	http://think.mtv.com/Cbabb/
ND	Emily Catalano	http://think.mtv.com/catalano324/
NE	Jane Fleming Kleeb	http://think.mtv.com/janeflemingkleeb/
NH	Lauren Sausser	http://think.mtv.com/laurensausser/
NJ	Sia Nyorkor	http://think.mtv.com/TheSweetestThing/
NM	Christine Begay	http://think.mtv.com/xinemb/
NV	Michael Gonzales	http://think.mtv.com/MiGoNev/
NY	Sara Benincasa Donnelly	http://think.mtv.com/SaraBenincasa1/
OH	Joel Hanek	http://think.mtv.com/jhanek/
OK	Jill Penuel	http://think.mtv.com/jillpenuel/
OR	Nezua Limon Xolographix-Jonez	http://think.mtv.com/Nezua/
PA	Cassidy Hartmann	http://think.mtv.com/Cassidy/
RI	Tom Shevlin	http://think.mtv.com/rireport/
SC	Shantel Middleton	http://think.mtv.com/ShantelM/
SD	Jonna Langston	http://think.mtv.com/joleah13/
TN	Dustin Ogdin	http://think.mtv.com/dustin7/
TX	Maira Garcia	http://think.mtv.com/mairalg/
UT	Charles Geraci	http://think.mtv.com/cgeraci25/
VA	Sabina Thaler	http://think.mtv.com/SabinaVA/
VT	Dustin Degree	http://think.mtv.com/ddegreevt/
WA	Cory Midgarden	http://think.mtv.com/Cory/
WI	Charlie Berens	http://think.mtv.com/CharlieB/
WV	Griffin McElroy	http://think.mtv.com/griffinmcelroy/
WY	Nick Perkins	http://think.mtv.com/WesternRebel1/

Another Take on McCain's MySpace/MTV Appearance

2007-12-03T23:20:05-05:00

You got Josh's view from inside the belly of the beast. Now here's what it looked like for those following along online.

The first Republican candidate has finally had their turn in the Myspace/MTV dialogues. Tonight Senator John McCain took questions from a live audience in Manchester, NH, supplemented by feedback from the Flektor Polling widget and IM comments from those watching via MTV, MTV.com, and MySpace, in both English and Spanish.

There were really two question on the table tonight - how would MTV an MySpace improve what has to date been the most participatory candidate forums in the campaign; and how would the feedback process developed by MTV and MySpace work when put up against a candidate who's position on a number of issues widely diverged from that of the audience?

On the part of MTV, there were a number of improvements. For the first time the event was simulcast on TV and the web, instead of rebroadcast later in the evening. This timing was also significant in that this was the first debate originally taped/streamed/aired when young professionals, students - everyone who would find this debate interesting and might want to participate online - could be at home to watch. Questions from the online audience were posted on-screen, making them easier to follow, and the moderator Cilizza seemed slightly more aggressive in his follow-ups (this could have been due to the more adversarial relationship McCain had to the audience than previous participants). Finally, in a nod to the growing Hispanic population - which is also a very young population - the event was simulcast in Spanish.

As for the feedback loop, it was definitely in effect, though not quite in the way that I expected. All in all, McCain did quite well. Throughout the evening, the Senator fielded a much wider range of questions than what the Republicans fielded at the recent YouTube/CNN Debate, something the Senator himself astutely noted. On questions about climate change and Darfur, he polled quite well, and by being frank with the audience about issues on which they disagreed (Iraq and troop withdrawals, the only question where more than 50% of the respondents disagreed with his answers), McCain managed to at least keep - if not enhance - his credibility during moments with high-gaffe/negative impact potential.

McCain seems to have skillfully walked a tightrope on the issue of Iraq. If he had become too defensive, or less artfully set up his disagreements with the audience, there might have been a backlash both in the polling and in the tone of followup questions. That didn't happen. Instead, McCain actually gained ground among the viewing audience during the debate, demonstrating a positive, rather than negative feedback loop with the audience.

While I expected a functioning feedback loop between a Republican candidate, and a young audience to create a great deal of pushback and an adversarial relationship with the candidate, in fact the opposite seems to have happened. At the beginning of the debate, the online audience was polled as to their opinion of Sen. McCain on "the issues." At the top of the hour, 60% of respondents either agreed with the Senator or thought they might. By the end of the evening, that number had risen to 72%. That's not bad for an hour's work, and ample evidence that Republicans can gain ground with young voters if they attempt to reach out and speak to them substantively and honestly on the issues - even if that means agreeing to disagree.

An interesting side-note to the evening was a video question submitted by What's Your Plan, a program of The New Voters Project, that seeks to ask all the candidates detailed questions about their policy proposals. When MySpace/MTV announced that they would air one video question from the viewing audience based on an open voting process, the group used a FaceBook group to organize support for their video about climate change.

There are still a few quibbles with the format. There could still be more follow-up questions on each issue, and they don't yet seem to have figured out how to handle cross-issue contradictions (for instance, McCain said multiple times that he would "fully fund" things, but also talked about cutting wasteful spending without talking about how those two positions might be contradictory in a Republican administration). Additionally, Cillizza, the online moderator, didn't inject himself enough into the debate when the candidate dodged, or when the background knowledge of the students was insufficient to really press a follow-up.

All in all though, MTV and MySpace keep upping the ante with these candidate forums, and in terms of creating a more transparent, participatory interaction between the candidates and a mass audience, they continue to blow CNN and YouTube out of the water. With one month to go before the Iowa Caucus, it seems unlikely that we'll get more than one more of these dialogues - if that - before the media crowns victors in both parties' nominating contests. As we enter the general election, these formats should become the gold standard for all future debates and televised forums.

Cross posted at Future Majority.

Jott the Vote: A National Application Begging to Go Local?

2007-10-19T12:12:24-04:00

Yesterday I got an email about a new use of technology in the Presidential race - Jott the Vote. Essentially, Jott the Vote is a non-partisan, third party tool that allows voters to send a message to any of the Presidential campaigns via phone. Users dial a toll free number and can leave a voicemail of up to 30 seconds for selected candidates. That candidate's campaign will then receive both audio and transcribed copies of the message via email.

On their website, Jott aggregates these messages, providing a real time look at which candidates voters are talking to, and how many people have "jotted" a specific candidate (at the time of this writing, Ron Paul was the "most jotted" candidate with a paltrey 32 Jotts). A digg-like functionality allows users to "second" someone else's message, though it's unclear whether campaigns are informed of this secondary support, or if it even makes a difference in how the Jott website displays content. Campaigns and supporters are offered the option of tracking their buzz via widgets (pictured right) that aggregate the latest voice mails.

While this is a neat little application, and everything is extremely well executed, it's unclear to me how this is anything more than a novelty in the 2008 primary campaign. While it is interesting that the tool enables voters to contact the presidential campaigns, without buy-in from the campaigns to do anything with those messages, it's hard to see any real advantage beyond making it slightly easier to contact a campaign that receives so much email per day that yours is bound to be ignored (it's not even clear who in the campaign receives these emails - a generic address in the national office?). In the end, users would probably be better off expressing their concerns over the phone to someone in a local office.

The widgets are also a very interesting idea, but it's unclear who would use them and why. Jott does not censor the messages users send, and eventually this tool could be used to express dissatisfaction with a candidate's position - making it distinctly less attractive of a tool for both supporters of a candidate or a campaign that is exercising tight message control.

In the end, Jott the Vote seems to be an application screaming for more local applications. Calling elected officials to discuss an issue or to ask them to change their vote on a piece of legislation can be an intimidating act. That intimidation factor probably keeps thousands of would-be-activists from taking action on any number of issues. Jott the Vote's one-stop-shopping, and non-confrontational format could significantly lower that type of psychological barrier to participation.

Beyond that Jott the Vote could potentially offer a solution to a conundrum of the activist community. One of the primary ways that a grassroots group can effect change in our political system is by directing their membership to contact local officials. Typically this happens through an online letter writing tool. The problem is that legislators often regard hundreds or thousands of form emails as so much spam, and it is difficult for grassroots organizers to get their members to write unique, and authentic, emails. Jott the Vote's voicemail system makes it easy for would-be activists to create their own tailored messages that are verifiably authentic. Congressmen and state level politicians might be more susceptible to this type of grassroots campaign than they are to today's form emails.

Overall, Jott the Vote is a good idea, but the focus needs a little fine-tuning. This type of innovation might be vastly more useful at the local level than in a presidential campaign, where I fear it will remain nothing more than the latest tech novelty.

Cross posted at Future Majority.

In Search of A Feedback Loop: Grading the MySpace/MTV Candidate Dialogue

2007-09-27T16:21:47-04:00

Cross-posted at Future Majority.

After a few technical glitches, the MTV/MySpace candidate dialogue series kicked off today, streamed live from the University of New Hampshire, where Sentator John Edwards was grilled by college students, and held accountable for his answers by online viewers who voted their approval or disapproval of senator's answers in real time.

Billed as a new way to empower (young) voters, partners MTV and MySpace promised to deliver a new format that would allow for more participation on the part of the viewing audience, as well as a dose of accountability for politicians who frequently use these forums to deliver talking points rather than answer the public's questions. In practice, the event was a large step in that direction, though somewhat less than it could have been.

Scheduled to start at noon, the live stream started at least 15 minutes late, and numerous glitches prevented some users - myself included - from fully participating. Viewing the stream on both the MTV and MySpace site twice crashed my Firefox browser, forcing me to use Safari (and miss about 5 minutes of the forum), and Mac users like myself were locked out of the instant message portion of the event, limiting our ability to access some of the more participatory elements of the event.

Despite that, the Flektor widget that allowed users to rate Senator Edwards' responses in real time was a joy. The widget provided up-to-the-second information about how the Senator's remarks were playing among the crowd, and provided instant focusing group data on the Senator's issue positions among a highly engaged portion of the youth electorate.

The campaign must surely be happy with the results. Senator Edwards remarks frequently netted approval ratings in the high 70s and 80s, and by the end of the forum, 90% of the audience thought the Senator had provided good ideas on the many policy issues raised. Preliminary evidence from Flektor shows that over 32,000 people have viewed the widget, though Jeff Berman, Senior Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs at MySpace.com, said that official figures on participation levels would be released within the next 24 hours.

Whether or not Senator Edwards receives a bump in the polls from this highly rated performance remains to be seen. Will high approval ratings translate into new votes for the Senator, or will Senators Obama and Clinton garner similar ratings, indicating broad support among the audience for specific types of policy solutions, but not necessarily support for any given candidate? It begs the question of as to whether or not implementing such polling devices during regular debates might be a more useful tool for gaging the mind of the electorate.

Edwards' high approval ratings - and the consistent disapproval he received from a small percentage of the audience - raise other questions as well. 90% approval for what might be termed "liberal" or "progressive" policy ideas is above and beyond the most optimistic polls, which typically show youth support for Democratic ideas over Republican ideas to be at most 60-70% (pdf). Was the audience mainly composed of voters who were predisposed to like Edwards proposals? And what is the likelihood that supporters or opponents could Freep the results in future townhalls?

While the insta-polling provided viewers with a much broader perspective of the significance of Edwards answers, and established a proof of concept for an exciting and more participatory way for voters to interact with the candidates on issues, the event failed to realize the full potential of the format it is pioneering. This was probably unavoidable during this first attempt, and due in equal parts to the human moderation of the questions and the fact that an astounding number professed the highest degree of support for the Senator's positions.

In the context of a debate or townhall, the real value in insta-polling viewers opinions is two fold: to create a feedback loop that can inform questions from the audience or moderator, and to hold accountable politicians who try to dodge a question, play down unpopular positions, or steer the discussion towards predetermined talking points. Since an overwhelming portion of today's viewers agreed with Senator Edwards and indicated that he satisfactorily answered their questions, it never became necessary for moderator Chris Cillizza to hold his feet to the fire over an answer, leaving one of the great potentials of this format untapped (which is not necessarily a bad thing - no one wants politicians lying or obfuscating their responses).

In regards to the creation of a positive feedback loop, the MTV/MySpace dialogue did not seem equipped to take full advantage of the direct connection they established between the audience, the moderators, and the candidate. All the questions on which the audience voted were determined in advance, and it was not possible for viewers to adjust their vote as the candidate clarified his responses or addressed follow-up questions. In addition, while there were topical questions provided by viewers at home via IM, as well as follow-ups by Chris Cillizza, very few of these seemed to be drawn directly from the voting results or in response to remarks from the Senator. Instead of a well oiled machine taking inputs from a variety of sources - townhall members, voting data, IM submissions - and using them to inform one another and act as the driver of the conversation, what MTV and MySpace provided was an informative aggregator of all of these data sources from which viewers could draw their own conclusions.

It is possible that future iternations of the candidate dialogues will evolve to address this question and create an even more dynamic relationship between viewer, candidate and moderator. In a conversation following the event, Jeff Berman noted that MySpace would "take input from users and other people and tweak [the format] more. . . we dont' have a patent on the perfect way of doing it, and after every one of these events we will do a critical analysis to see how we can do it better next time. This is about empowering people in a way that has never happened before."

I'd say that Berman and his team are off to a great start, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they upgrade this in the future. Whatever its faults, today's forum was far more informative than any of the candidate debates we've seen thus far, and a model for all candidate forums from here on out.

MTV's Candidate Dialogues Are Promising

2007-09-26T16:24:08-04:00

Cross posted and updated from Future Majority.

MTV's "dialogues" with the candidates are starting up tomorrow, and on deck is Sen. John Edwards. As reported on multiple sites, these dialogues have the potential to be the most interactive and informative debates thus far in an election cycle that's seen some decent innovation in how candidates and the public interact. Streamed live over MySpace TV and MTV.com, the debates offer the chance for viewers to provide instantaneous feedback on the answers of each candidate and to pose new questions in response to those answers. Live chats will allow viewers to hash out candidate responses on the MTV and MySpace websites, and no doubt the candidates themselves will offer ample space for supporters to comment on the dialogues.

If all goes according to plan, the event should function as an interactive feedback loop that looks something like this: one of the moderators will quiz candidates on issues selected a pool of voter-generated questions. Viewers will then rate the candidate's responses, and supply follow-up questions, which are picked up by the moderator and posed to the candidates. In a perfect world, this will be a truly interactive conversation, and one that breaks down the candidates' all too familiar ability to steer clear of questions they don't want to answer and drive the conversation towards a set of predetermined talking points.

For those curious (I know I am) as to how the instant polling of the audience will work, the kind folks at Mashable have produced this early glimpse at the MTV MySpace Widget that will allow viewers to rate the candidate’s responses in real time.

I have perhaps unreasonably high hopes for this debate, though there are a number of issues that still give me pause about MySpace and MTV’s endeavor to alter the mode of public debate.

First, and foremost is the day and time of the event: Thursday at noon. I don’t know whose call that was, but this strikes me as only the second worst time to pick. Students - presumably one of the core audiences for this debate - will be in school at that time, and many high schools do not allow students to access social networks from campus. College students likewise will be in class or roaming campus instead of glued to a computer screen, and young professionals will surely be at work. Is MTV looking to sabotage it’s own event, or are they trying to keep the numbers manageable for fear that their technology won’t be able to handle a high volume of participants? I’m not sure which (if any of these) might be true, but the questions are worth asking.

Second, the announcement of the moderators is giving me The Fear that this will be a less than successful event: Gideon Yago, whose political coverage never particularly impressed me as hard hitting, is one of the moderators along with SuChin Pak, an MTV news reporter of whom I’ve never heard of (even though, thanks to my girlfriend, I watch a lot of MTV). The third moderator is Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza. Unfortunatley, even with all the fancy flash widgets and chatroom chatter, it is the still the editorial discretion of these moderators that will determine how successful and how groundbreaking these dialogues really are. I’ve got a hard time seeing Yago or Cillizza really push these candidates on their answers. SuChin Pak is a wild card in this equation, but I can’t see Viacom putting someone out there who will really rock the boat. If Cilliza and Yago and Pak do not select tough questions, fail to push Edwards to go beyond platitudes when viewers vote unfavorably, or if they let the candidate dodge follow-up questions from the digital audience, these dialogues will be more political theater than participatory public debate.

Despite this, I remain cautiously optimistic. After a number of years with lackluster political coverage and little involvement in truly engaging young people in politics, MTV is emerging as one of the more innovative players of the campaign cycle. Along with these dialogues, MTV has announced a 50 state vlogging strategy, in which they are hiring 1 reporter in each state to cover the local political scene, and providing those reporters with a salary and video equipment to capture their experience on film; the company recently launched THINK MTV, a combination online social network and video sharing site designed purely to serve the interests of young activists. Even Choose Or Lose, MTV’s previously lackluster PSA campaign is stepping up its game this cycle.

I hope these events will be groundbreaking, though they could easily just fizzle out. Our first chance to find out will be tomorrow at noon, when John Edwards takes the stage.

Insta-Polling Young Voters, State by State

2007-09-24T14:44:47-04:00

Cross-posted at Future Majority.

Our Voice 2008 is a new, nonpartisan youth politics site that is getting ready to soft launch next week with an interesting idea for amplifying the voice of young voters in the political process: snap-polling its users on topical issues and providing its users with the means to break down that data by state for display on websites and social networking profiles.

On signing up for the site, users complete a profile which includes a sliding-scale ranking of the issues that most concern you (there are about 10 issues between which the scales help you divvy up 100 “points”) and rate each of the Presidential candidates. Each month, OV2008 will offer nonpartisan descriptions of various issues (talk about a minefield! How do you describe abortion or health care or any issue in a way that is both useful and unbiased? Solutions have to come from somewhere) and poll their user-base for their opinions on that issue. Users will be able to display this information on their social networking profiles or websites via widgets developed by OV2008, while the organization itself will push the information out to the presidential campaigns in an attempt to influence the debate.

The idea is interesting, but with such an unscientific method of polling, it will need to reach a very large critical mass of users if it is to produce information of any use to the campaigns, media, or even local organizers. Unfortunately, the project is running very much under the radar at the moment, and the first major data collection period is almost up (October 1st). There’s no way to know from the site how many people have created profiles, though with a respectable if insufficient 1,000 friends on Facebook and a paltry 16 friends on MySpace, the project does not appear to have anything close to critical mass, which I place (at minimum) around a few thousand participants in each of the 50 states (or at least the first 5 or 6 primary states). Without that critical mass, it’s unclear to me how this becomes more useful to campaigns, media outlets, or nonprifits like Rock the Vote than the internal polls they already produce.

I spoke with Ryan Comfort, the founder of Our Voice 2008, about these issues and Comfort acknowledged that attaining critical mass is the key, and pointed out that they are only in the initial stages of their operation, with the website barely a few weeks old. He and a team of students at the University of Pennsylvania (Comfort is a recent Wharton graduate) are currently working on creating a campus outreach plan. Once that plan is complete, Our Voice 2008 will begin to recruit volunteers at universities across the country whose job it will be to build support for the organization among students.

Even if Our Voice 2008 never reaches the critical mass to become a viable project (the most likely outcome, I think), it remains a solid idea that a more established organization might be able to execute. The idea of insta-polling a large and geographically group of young voters is not radically different from what MySpace and MTV are set to do during their candidate dialogues. The technology is already out there. An organization like Rock the Vote just might have a big enough brand to pull create a critical mass of users, and enough clout within the political community to actually get the campaigns to pay attention to the results.

But then again, since merging with Young Voter Strategies, Rock the Vote already has its own polling and research arm, so the question becomes, is there value added in snap polling in addition to the more methodical polling the organization already employs? I think yes. I’m 29 years old, and never in my life (even when I had a landline) have I been polled. I think a lot of young voters might jump at the chance to participate in such a polling process provided they could:

Participate remotely and on their own schedule via a social networking widget.
They knew that the organization conducting the polls was working in the interests of young voters.
They knew that the organization was committed to pushing the results to the media and the political campaigns.
They saw that commitment through increased/changed coverage and campaign messaging.

If such a project could operate like the Rock the Vote voter registration widget, and allow organizations to create their own versions and maintain user data, this could be a very interesting development. It remains to be seen of OV2008 can pull it off, or if another organization is willing to pick up on it.

Mike Connery blogs about youth politics at Future Majority.