http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602084.html
Young Voters Find Voice on Facebook
Site's Candidate Groups Are Grass-Roots Politics for the Web Generation
By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 17, 2007; Page A01
Excerpts:
Late on the day that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee, Farouk Olu Aregbe logged on to Facebook.com, the popular online community where college students post profiles, share photos and blog.
On a whim he created a group called "One Million Strong for Barack."
"I remember thinking, there's got to be more supporters out there," said Farouk, 26, who advises student government at the University at Missouri at Columbia.
Farouk's group had
100 members in the
first hour. In less than
five days,
10,000. By the
third week, nearly
200,000. Yesterday, a
month after he created the group, it had
278,100 members.
There are
more than 500 Obama groups on Facebook.
One of the first, "Students for Barack Obama," was created on July 7 by Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College who first heard of Obama when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Instead of starting "a petition or something" to encourage the freshman senator to run for president, she turned to her Facebook page, created a group and invited people (first her friends, later strangers) to join.
Now it's a political action committee with nearly 62,000 members and chapters at 80 colleges, the most structured grass-roots student movement -- there's a director of field operations, an Internet director, a finance director and a blog team director -- in the presidential campaign so far. "Young people are on the Web," said Segal, 21. "That's how we're organizing."
(snip)
A few weeks ago, Segal's group staged a
rally at George Mason University that drew an estimated 3,000 students --
and an appearance from Obama himself.
This past Sunday, her group's
Iowa State University chapter helped promote a rally that attracted
more than 5,000.
(snip)
Meetup.com helped energize the Dean campaign, but more sophisticated social-networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace were not a factor during the 2004 election. A recent Pew Research Center poll, however, reported that 54 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds have used them. And
Joe Trippi, who spearheaded Dean's e-campaign, is among those who believe they will play a significant role in the current race.
"It took our campaign six months to get 139,000 people on an e-mail list," Trippi said. "It took one Facebook group, what, barely a month to get 200,000? That's astronomical."
(snip)
Added Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Group, a D.C.-based Internet communications firm that works with Republicans: "
The key point here is that the
support for Obama on these social-networking sites is not being driven by the campaign itself. It is something spontaneous as opposed to something the campaign itself is orchestrating. This shows a real enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy among young people that you aren't seeing for any other candidates at this point."
(snip)
Clinton has about the same number of Facebook groups as Obama, but the largest has only about 3,000 members, and many of the sites are maintained by opponents. For every group called "African-Americans for Hillary Rodham Clinton" (95 members), there is a group called "A second Bush was bad enough, don't give me a second Clinton" (55 members). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has some presence on the site; a group called "John McCain in 2008" has 1,617 members. And though Obama himself has a few detractors -- a group that calls itself "Anybody That Would Support Barack Obama for President is a Moronic Liberal" has 424 members -- no one comes close to his overall popularity.
At 11 a.m. yesterday, "One Million Strong for Barack" had 278,100 members. Two and a half hours later, 278,537. Three hours later, 279,070.
link to the A2Kers for Obama group I created on barackobama.com
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/A2KersforObama
