Internet Politics 101: The List vs The Network
By Micah L. Sifry, 01/08/2008 - 3:51pm

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Back in early September, Hillary Clinton's campaign made a big deal about how it had signed up its millionth supporter, a computer programmer from Georgia named Ron Wood. You can watch the video of Wood and his friend Michelle Smith meeting the Clintons, and traveling to a labor rally in Des Moines, here. Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent out an email bragging of the accomplishment: "What's the power of a million? It's the power to run a winning campaign; it's the power to restart the 21st century; it's the power to make history."

As best as I can recall, that's the only metric of grassroots organizing the Clinton campaign has ever shared with the public. And the news that it had, by September, built a million-member email list, was no small accomplishment. Until recently, that was every politician's goal: a huge list that you could hit up for donations and volunteers, again and again.

But compare the power of a list to the power of a network.

Right now, the Obama campaign boasts that more than 350,000 people have created personal accounts on My.BarackObama.com, more than 25,000 have created blogs on the site; more than 20,000 have created their own personal fundraising pages with their own goals, thermometers to track progress, and follow-up tools; more than 20,000 offline local events have been planned using related tools on the site; and more than 6,500 active grassroots volunteer groups have formed in support of Obama with more than 200,000 members.

To be purely schematic about it, let's posit that Clinton's giant list falls into this form of one-to-many communication, (Forgive me if this looks like it was sketched on a back of a napkin--but it's essentially an abstracted form of a graphic my partner Andrew Rasiej has been drawing for years in his efforts to get politicians to wake up to the power of the net.)


Here we have one speaker and many recipients. The conversation is all one-way. The citizens are isolated from each other, and the politician isn't do much to either introduce them to each other, or to respond to their feedback.

That was the paradigm of broadcast TV and direct mail fundraising. Now we're in a networked age, where everyone can connect to everyone else and expects some degree of interactivity and reciprocity. Further, the power is shifting away from the speaker at the top towards the network of connections forming among all the participants.

In practice, this converts in all kinds of ways to political power. A campaign can send an appeal to its million-member list, or it can foster a network of 20,000 small-donor activists, each with their own personal lists. If you assume that an email to a million people will have about a 20% open rate and a 20% click thru, that's 40,000 responses. Not bad. But people are far more likely to respond to a personal appeal from a friend or an acquaintance than an impersonal mass email.

To date, Obama's campaign has amassed more than 750,000 contributions from more than 500,000 individual donors. And that doesn't reflect whatever additional fundraising they've experienced since winning the Iowa caucus!

There's more power in a network than a list.

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To be fair to the Clinton campaign

The Clinton campaign also has an Action Center, which has many of the same features as My.BarackObama.com.

I think it comes down to ROI. Building a network is much more resource intensive than building a list. Also, a list is a concrete asset with real value, that can be swapped or even (gasp!) sold. A network cannot.

Joining a network is a tougher "ask". Filling in your email address and zip code on a splash page is one thing. Filling in your name and providing a password to create an account is another. Joining a list is anonymous to everyone but the campaign, joining a network makes you findable to anyone else on the network.

Being a national Presidential campaign is a huge soapbox to have, something smaller campaigns and most advocacy orgs can't benefit from. I doubt most activists on My.BarackObama.com would join up to a similar network set up by a Senate campaign or a non-profit, even if they supported those causes just as much.

By Luigi Montanez at Tue, 01/08/2008 - 7:12pm | login or register to post comments

The graphic

Oh also, I know Zephyr has a really good graphic similar to the one above, but this one shows that in a network, the center can be removed (the P), but communication is still possible among the C's.

By Luigi Montanez at Tue, 01/08/2008 - 7:19pm | login or register to post comments

All fair points, but

Luigi--

Yes, lists look easier to build than networks. But my point was to try to illustrate something about how the different approaches Clinton and Obama have taken to internet-based organizing are now playing out.

Micah

By Micah L. Sifry at Tue, 01/08/2008 - 7:37pm | login or register to post comments

How many people are on Obama's list?

Micah--

Without know how big Barack's email list is, drawing a conclusion this strong is suspect -- you can't separate out your variables. At worst, I bet he doesn't have many fewer list members than Hillary does, and if he has 500,000 donors (essentially all of whom end up on his list), he's likely to have MORE people on his email list than she does. If you have hard numbers about email subscribers from his campaign, I'd like to see them.

Basically, I think you're drawing a misleading distinction -- the best thing is to have both a big list AND a big network. It isn't network vs. top-down, it's network AND top-down -- just as a campaign has both grassroots activists AND television commercials. Without encouragement from the top (the people who provided the networking tools in the first place), it's hard for a candidate-support network to form and thrive (if it were easy, we'd have lot of Ron Paul/Howard Dean candidates running around, and we don't). For example, a good question to ask is how many started those blogs and those fundraising campaigns because they received an email encouraging them to do so.

Colin Delany
e.politics
http://www.epolitics.com

By Colin Delany at Tue, 01/08/2008 - 7:51pm | login or register to post comments

Yes, and

Colin--

Yes, it's big network and big list. Oh, and by the way, a strong message and a strong messenger.

I just don't see much in the way of Clinton's organizing network, other than the pre-Internet networks she and Bill have, plus the unions. Neither of which reach young people.

Micah

By Micah L. Sifry at Tue, 01/08/2008 - 10:57pm | login or register to post comments

Yes and #2...

The network is part of the story, but the conversation is another. Lists of people aren't enough. Homegrown networks aren't enough either. Candidates must engage in the conversation to cut through and grab attention. Think about what interaction / communication / persuasion is outside the reach of the campaign? Certainly more than what is inside...

More of my musings...

By gibson_stevens at Wed, 01/09/2008 - 9:33am | login or register to post comments

network building isn't that hard

You just have to invest in the right toolset up front. Obama did exactly that; I can't understand the conventional wisdom saying that Ron Paul is the only people-powered candidate this cycle. Obama's just the first people-powered candidate to have a network that's getting big enough that it's starting to maybe (BIG maybe actually) translate into actual votes. It's going to be an interesting 3 1/2 weeks.

By Dan Ancona at Wed, 01/09/2008 - 8:50pm | login or register to post comments

power of a network

The power of a network will far surpass that of a simple email list... always. The thing you don't get with an email list is investment. With a social network, people will invest themselves in it, nobody cares about an email list.

The candidates don't even need to build a social network, they can just use existing ones. Social networks are the future.

***
http://republican.konnects.com

By conservstudent at Wed, 02/20/2008 - 9:54pm | login or register to post comments



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