| So I looked at the group 'a Million Strong for Barack' yesterday, and noticed it had around 330,000 members. That's a lot of people, but the exponential growth rate that had the group hitting a million months back did not keep up with expectations. It's not clear to me what happened, but it looks like Obama has moved the group onto his site where tracking numbers is much harder. I remember hitting refresh on the page months ago, astonished that every time I did so another 5 people had become members of the group. It reminded me of the Dean campaign and their fundraising numbers. The current relative lack of movement reminds me of the plateauing of the Dean email list in the fall of 2003.
On his own profile, Obama has 186,976 friends on Facebook and another 169317 on MySpace. That sounds impressive, but that number on MySpace is actually about the same as the number volunteer Joe Anthony put together, and Obama's growth rate on Facebook is much slower at this point than Clinton or Edwards. In the last four months according to TechPresident's nifty tool, Clinton doubled her number, albeit from a much smaller base, whereas Obama has increased his number by about 80 percent. That's a lot, sure, but it's not the growth he needs coming into the caucuses. Clinton also beats Obama in blog traffic, but that's not really a surprise since neither candidate has a separate conversation in the blogs going on and so that number is going to track media coverage.
It's possible, even probable, that all the activity has moved onto BarackObama.com, and away from public spaces. Obama did have over a quarter million donors, though some of that included people that bought T-Shirts and Obama gear. And I'm sure he has an email list in the millions at this point. I don't know for sure, though, because there's no transparency on his site, there are no 'Join XYZ other people' buttons. Movement campaigns work best when they are transparent so others feel like they are part of something. Still, I'm sure there will be transparency come the end of September, and we'll know more. And maybe we won't know more until the Iowa caucuses, when a student army comes out for Barack, or until the later primaries, where his field operation kicks in.
The 2004 campaign produced a burst of innovation, of political entrepreneurs who came into the process with new ideas and new tactics. Largely this group coalesced around Howard Dean or Wes Clark, both of whom articulated a different model of politics and argued the Iraq War was a symptom of a broken political and cultural system. The Million Strong for Barack group suggested that was possible here too, but it's not clear to me what kind of argument Obama is making except that cynicism is a bad thing. And where are the new entrepreneurs? It's entirely possible that I've become 'Beltway' or out of touch and am missing something huge, so I just thought I'd put this question out there.
UPDATE: This is pretty neat, MySpace profiles for every state with a focus on the early states. The numbers aren't great, but they are much more valuable on each page. |
