Chapter 6:
The New Politics - Content Nation Redefines
How Citizens Influence Governments

"All politics is local" observed Tip O'Neill, a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. O'Neill was a Congressman from Cambridge, Massachusetts who learned this maxim of politics when he lost his first political campaign - a race for a seat on his local city council - by only 150 votes. When O'Neill asked some of the people in his neighborhood why they hadn't voted for him, they told him "You didn't ask for my vote." Tip O'Neill never forgot this lesson and went on to a very successful career in politics in which he was known for his ability to lead and influence the most unlikely combinations of political allies to get their votes - and to get business done. The art of politics is indeed all local, based on building bonds of trust and delivering on personal promises to people who have entrusted someone with their personal political endorsement.

If ever there were an activity that was perfectly tailored for social media, politics would certainly be one of them. Political systems may vary from one location to another but the art of politics is a universal human discipline that calls upon the most powerful tools of human communications available to build leadership, endorsement and influence. Rarely has there been a substitute that would trump a politician meeting personally with people to build influential relationships, but social media enables masses of people to participate in political processes in personal ways that make all politics a local affair on a scale never before achieved in human history.

To underscore the universality of the lessons to be learned from the use of social media in politics I have tried to write this chapter from as neutral a political position as possible using examples from across the world's political spectrum. Given that many of the most compelling examples of the use of social media in politics stem from situations with major political impact that's not such an easy thing for an author to do. Some of the political figures and organizations in this chapter may appeal to you: some may not. Whatever the person or political view being portrayed or my portrayal of them I hope that you can focus on the lessons to be learned about social media from a particular point of view and not on the political views of the people and organizations being used as examples.

From Monarchs to Conversations to Dictation: The Evolution of Publishing as a Political Tool

Earlier in the book we looked at the availability of affordable publishing tools and venues popular during the time of the American War of Independence in the 18th century that allowed everyday people to discuss political ideas with fellow citizens and to take decisive political action. Publishing, once the political tool of monarchs, became a tool for building citizen awareness of political issues. In the 19th century the rise of mass-produced newspapers, journals and books built a wide awareness of political issues and theories that resulted in massive political changes in Europe and elsewhere. This broadcasting of ideas that formed the core of modern politics provoked new thinking and produced powerful new political movements. The 20th century witnessed the rise of electronic media used for politics, adding radio, recorded sound and moving images to the arsenal of political communications. Literacy was no longer a requirement for mass political communications. With these tools powerful political messages could quickly galvanize entire nations to do the will of its political leaders - sometimes with beneficial results, sometimes with disastrous results.

With the rise of television broadcasting in the late 20th century the techniques of mass marketing blended with politics to create political television advertisements and influential news opinion television shows that began to shape politics as a consumer marketing discipline, packaging candidates as if they were household products and shaping their positions on issues as part of a brand strategy to appeal precisely to the tastes of specific well-researched groups of citizens. Political discussions on a personal level were still important, but somehow the ability of citizens to use publishing to fire the discussion of political ideas with peers as the primary channel for political decisions and actions had been lost to the political process in many nations by the end of the 20th century. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the simple pamphlet by a lone citizen in the political wilderness of colonial America, was all but forgotten as a model for motivating fellow citizens to take political action by the dawn of the 21st century. Conversation amongst citizens had given way to dictation to consumers.

Social Media in Politics: New Tools for Conversations

Early Web: Promising Tools, Small Audience

The first hints of the power of social media to influence politics via Web-enabled publishing were already evident by the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales. While the event became a global media phenomenon via broadcast television, it was likely the first event with global impact that had been carried via live online video services. Fuzzy, tiny pictures rolled across computer screens around the world, enabling people to witness another nation's state funeral as if it were a funeral of one of their own. People could retrieve video clips on the Web of the event later on at will, enabling people to participate not only globally but at any convenient time. People could listen in to some comments at Princess Diana's memorial service that were sharply critical of Britain's head of state. All of a sudden any time could be the right time to engage in a moving political video experience for people around the world on a moment's notice. Nonetheless, these video clips were for the most part simply repackaging existing television broadcast reports.

Early weblogs and other Web-based social media experiments in politics were significant but more as a way to feed established media outlets than social media tools in their own right. The Drudge Report's famed 1998 breaking of the story of President Bill Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was a key breakthrough that highlighted the potential power of bloggers as a channel for leaking stories from political sources, but the Web site's notoriety and power came primarily through established media outlets picking up the story and amplifying it to the public. There was at that time a fairly limited cadre of Web enthusiasts who were in a position to follow political events on the Web, much less comment on them in weblogs.

By the time of the 2000 U.S. elections, social media was beginning to be seen as a tool for helping political campaigns, but it did not influence the outcome of national elections in any significant way. Comments in Web forums and news sites generated some enthusiasm for candidates but for the the Web was still being used mostly as a one-way medium for the dissemination of information from central providers.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, an early promoter and enthusiast for the Web and a presidential candidate in 2000, provided on his campaign's Web site links to sign people up for email and instant message communications, live video camera shots of their campaign headquarters and the ability for people to design simple personalized pages where people could express their positions on political issues. While demonstrating many of the early best practices of Web site design used in that era the Gore campaign Web site and similar campaign sites built by other candidates were mostly experiments in building interaction amongst the growing but still relatively limited number of citizens who were using the Web in 2000 to learn about political campaigns.

The Howard Dean Campaign

By 2004, social media technologies on the Web had matured to the point that a rapidly expanding online audience equipped with rapidly improving Web publishing technologies could be engaged for political messages and activities at a far greater scope than ever before. In the United States candidates for political office began to engage citizens through social media and political activists began to leverage social media for their own efforts to organize and motivate citizens. While social media may not have played a crucial factor in the year's elections, its power was evident and growing quickly.

The political campaign of Howard Dean used many social media tools that proved to be key elements his U.S. presidential campaign. As the governor of Vermont,  Howard Dean was well known to an inner circle of politicians but relatively unknown to most voters beyond his own small New England state. His national profile changed rapidly when his campaign used social media tools to recruit and train people supporting his campaign, gather campaign contributions, communicate with supporters and to use them to rally additional support. Early opinion polling showed Dean's efforts paying off but with campaign management issues, strengthening opponents and the repeated playing of a now-famous Dean "scream" from a televised campaign rally, Howard Dean did not go on to become his party's candidate for President. But in the process of operating his relatively short-lived campaign the team behind the Howard Dean phenomenon had stumbled on to several key methods that began to put together the outlines of how to use social media tools effectively in politics:

• Using social media as a virtual and physical organizing tool. The Howard Dean campaign made extensive use of the then-new Meetup.com social networking tool, which enabled people to organize campaign enthusiasts for online meetings and in-person meetings at locations across the country. Web forums were used to help gain feedback on issues and to foster discussions about possible campaign tactics and messages that could be provided to voters and enabled campaign enthusiasts to draft letters to potential supporters. None of these concepts in and of themselves were particularly new, but the efficiency and ease with which new social media technologies could be deployed enabled citizen involvement and interaction with political candidates and their enthusiasts to scale very rapidly across an entire country in thousands of local communities with little central intervention.
• Using social media concepts to encourage small campaign contributions on a massive scale. While campaign Web sites had been used for several years to solicit campaign contributions via credit card donations, candidates would generally focus on raising the maximum contribution possible from relatively few donors. The Howard Dean campaign was the first to engineer very large numbers of very small contributions, using emails and viral marketing techniques to spread enthusiasm for donations with person-to-person solicitations for small donations similar to those used for non-profit causes. While Howard Dean was not able to out-raise other candidates in total funds raised he did raise a then-unprecedented $50 million from Web-based donations - and surpassed records set by earlier presidential campaigns in his party for funds raised in a three-month period. Instead of raising funds from a small number of large donors to be used to persuade citizens, the citizens themselves were persuaded to support a candidate and provided contributions and active involvement in a campaign as a form of personal endorsement.
• Using social media to design a campaign. A core of a few thousand enthusiastic Howard Dean supporters, known as "Deaniacs" by some, became expert at spreading enthusiasm and points of view across the Web. They wrote weblogs and commented on other people's weblogs, sent out emails, contributed passionate thoughts on forums. Most importantly, though was their ability to define via Meetup.com, other Web sites and in person how best to use social media tools to spread the word to other people. This self-organizing group of about 3,000 enthusiasts was able to leverage social media via their own efforts to become more than 140,000 enthusiasts in a few short months. "We fell into this by accident," Dean noted in an interview. "I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organization for us before we had an organization."

Ultimately the strengths of social media were not enough to enable Howard Dean's campaign to overcome some of its inherent weaknesses and the power of traditional media outlets to broadcast advertisements and the opinions of professional opinion-makers. Yet the Dean campaign has set precedents in how individual citizens could use social media not only to comment upon a political campaign but to actually shape that campaign. Citizens deciding to organize themselves for political action based on their own compelling political ideas had shaken off the dust of the ages and had siezed powerful new publishing tools in an era of global electronic communications.

Ron Paul: When Citizens Define a Candidate's Power and Influence

Congressman Ron Paul was a relatively unknown Texan in the U.S. House of Representatives who in March of 2007 began a campaign for his party's presidential nomination that most in his party considered to be quixotic at best - that is, until he was able to leverage his appearances in televised debates into campaign cash and strong grass-roots support through social media. Having run for the presidency as an independent candidate in 1988, Paul had a sense of how to campaign, but his greater sense of how to pull off a long-shot bid for a major party nomination came from his 2006 Congressional campaign, in which he raised virtually all of his campaign funds online from small citizen donations by emulating many of the techniques used by the 2004 Howard Dean campaign.

With knowledge of how to use social media and leveraging bloggers and the rapidly emerging strength of online video services and emerging social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace, Ron Paul had a strong grass roots organization already in place when he caught the attention of national audiences in televised presidential campaign debates. Largely discounted by both political analysts and reporters, he was able to transform his television performance into enormous waves of small online campaign contributions and a rapidly expanding network of citizens expressing their support for him online in video clips, discussion groups and viral marketing campaigns.

On 5 November 2007, an online fundraising campaign built around the British holiday commemorating the defeat of the anti-government figure Guy Fawkes - a figure celebrated in the popular 2005 movie "V for Vendetta"  - triggered $4.2 million in campaign contriubutions in 24 hours for Ron Paul's presidential campaign from small online donors - a then-unprecedented record for online fundraising. While Ron Paul was unable to translate his Web-based support into wide support for his party's presidential nomination he established that any candidate with any message has the potential to tap into strong sentiments amongst citizens - and that when citizens are passionate about political views it can translate into powerful political support that transcends the leadership and influence of traditional political power brokers.

Content Nation Political Rule #1: Powerful social media tools enable political power to grow from everyday citizens who organize and inspire one another autonomously and locally on a massive scale.

Political Blogs - Influence from Anywhere

Along with political campaigns seizing social media the 2004 elections also witnessed the widespread rise of people using weblogs to promote political opinions and to incite people to provide their personal support to politicians and political initiatives. While prominent political weblogs provided great influence it was also noteworthy how anyone's willingness to create an post a weblog on a candidate or an issue could gain attention and influence rapidly. Linkslinks from other weblogs and from search engines that were programmed to surface content to which other Web sites were linking made it possible for influential voices to appear out of nowhere. This has enabled a much wider discussion of a much wider array of political opinions than ever before. It is as if Thomas Paine had been cloned a million times over in a matter of a few months: everyone was inciting everybody into discussing and taking action on political issues, with our without any official political allegiances.

One of the more surprising instances of the spontaneity of political weblogs that arose in the 2004 election was a topical weblog that existed actively for only a few weeks - yet nevertheless gained enormous attention. In one of the televised presidential debates some viewers noticed rumples in the rear of then-candidate George W. Bush's suit coat that appeared in their minds to be a piece of electronic equipment to relay audio to an earpiece in Bush's ear. This incident was noticed briefly by some prominent weblogs but the creators of isbushwired.com , an anonymously authored weblog, decided to stick with the story and to collect information about this incident that accumulated.

The weblog attained such widespread interest from prominent bloggers that the Web site was frequently overloaded with viewers to the point of being unavailable, but when it was available a story-specific conduit for all of the latest and greatest information and links relating to this emerging news item. The weblog had been set up on Blogger.com 's free facility that enables a weblog to be set up in seconds. There was absolutely nothing unusual about the weblog - except that it had intense interest almost instantly. The ability of anyone to create a politically influential publication on a moment's notice clearly was changing the way that politics would unfold forever after.

Weblogs also enabled people who would normally gain political influence through print, radio and television to build audiences on the Web that in many instances helped them to create their own independent brands as political commentators. Michelle Malkin was a journalist whose syndicated political opinion column was popular with several major newspapers, but when she began her own weblog during the 2004 U.S. elections she found that her popularity among her Web audience began to take on a life of its own. While her opinion columns are still syndicated to major newspapers, her willingness to begin to use social media has enabled her to develop her independent brand as a personal publisher amongst other bloggers - while there was still a clear opportunity to stand out from other established journalists. Michelle Malkin uses all of the tools of blogging to make her independent presence possible, including a style of writing that mixes observations about her personal life with political observations that enables her to appeal to her audience as a person with everyday interests as well as political interests.

Political activist Markos Moulitsas - known widely as "Kos" - had started his Daily Kos political weblog in 2002 and gained an audience rapidly with his frankly worded blog entries, but he is most significant in that he turned his personal brand into a very powerful group brand for political blogging. Most sytems that support blogging enable more than one person to post entries to a weblog, a feature that is rarely used by most people but that was put to good use by Kos starting in 2004. Kos attracted bloggers who were able to contribute "diaries" - a collection of welblogs - to the site, and which were edited by Kos and others to provide content for the site's main weblog. This enabled Kos to focus on building the influence of his publication on a personal basis with media appearances and with conferences in which people who were readers of Daily Kos could interact with its weblog authors and to discuss politics. By cultivating the weblog's influence amongst policial enthusiasts Daily Kos' endorsements of candidates and its views on key issues are taken seriously by many political insiders and organizers - as well as the more than 700,000 political enthusiasts who vist the Daily Kos monthly.

The 2004 election also saw the questioning of weblogs as reliable sources of information. On the night of the November 2nd elections in the U.S. a number of weblogs, including the political gossip site Wonkette, carried exit poll results from various sources that did not reflect the ultimate result of the presidential election in several of the polled states. Traditional media outlets took bloggers to task as lacking journalistic integrity in releasing these exit polls prior to the close of national voting. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of these leaks, it was clear that traditional news outlets, well known for their own publishing of leaked documents, were now encountering competition from weblogs on breaking news about major political events on the most crucial day of political coverage. Presumably these exit poll numbers came from people on the inside of the political process, so one assumes that the bloggers given these leaked exit poll numbers served their political purposes - in other words, those with political power had recognized the power of weblogs to influence citizens. The use of social media for both information and disinformation to influence politics had begun in earnest.

Content Nation Political Rule #2: Social media allows anyone from anywhere to influence politics on a massive scale - including the powerful and the influential.

The Voice of the People: Blogs, Videos and Communities Speak Out

As much as social media has benefited candidates for a high-profile office like President of the United States it has also enabled people to speak out about any political issue at any scale. Many times social media' greatest impact is being felt by politicians in more local environments, enabling people to become aware of and get involved in local issues and to take a new look at local politicians who may have otherwise received relatively little scrutiny. If all politics is local, then local communities are certainly a part of social media's story.

The Partrick Coalition: Confronting Politicial Power with Citizen Involvement

An interesting example of social media in action in local communities is almost within sight of my home. A tract of undeveloped land is an unusual commodity in my home town of Westport, Connecticut, which is within easy commuting distance of New York City and a prime target for real estate development. So when an undeveloped 55-acre tract of land became available in 2002 not far from my home it was no surprise that a developer purchased the forested land and planned to use it for a major housing development. The catch: about half of the site was a swamp sitting atop a site that a century ago had been an industrial site still littered with toxic substances. In an area in which large open spaces are a rarity and with many residents relying on well water for their homes, the community near the parcel of land would be impacted significantly by this development.

Starting in 2002 a group of concerned citizens started an email mailing list to notify people of efforts to oppose the development. Soon after the Partrick Open Space Alliance, named for a scenic road near the parcel of land, launched a Web site that provided news, background documents, letter-writing tools, links to public opinion and online fund-raising to build opposition to powerful real estate and political interests who were intent on the development of this land. The Web site was publicized on photocopied flyers and roadside signs, enabling more people to learn about the issues regarding the development of this land and to receive the group's email alerts. Dozens of activists turned into hundreds rapidly and enabled a strong coalition of interests to bring their side of the issue to public hearings and town meetings and to heighten coverage in local newspapers. Highly motivated citizens who informed one another and influenced other residents and local government officials via social media brought a development once thought to be unopposable to a standstill for more than four years. The net result was a meaningful compromise: fewer than half of the original number of homes would be built on the site and the wetlands portion of the parcel were donated to a land conservancy trust in 2007. In a town in which most people are commuting to their jobs and not able to commit much time to local causes, social media enabled a community to act like a community - using just the most basic online publishing tools and a good deal of commitment.

Content Nation Political Rule #3: If local media doesn't take interest in a community cause, social media can enable people to create their own independent influence rapidly and effectively.

Local Political Blogs: Nobody Special Influences Political Leaders and Elections

My home state of Connecticut is generally a pretty quiet place, but our local politics now come into the spotlight in exciting ways thanks to social media. Connecticut has developed a thriving community of local bloggers who work together oftentimes to cover local and state political events and to build community interest in issues and campaigns. Equipped with mobile video cameras and using freely available video editing tools their blogs are capturing the flavor of local politics as musch as they are capturing information and opinions. Bloggers post videos to YouTube and embed them in their blog posts, enabling them to build exposure rapidly for local political and encounters with local politicians. Politicians who might otherwise never be known or heard by the local electorate find their statements bring broadcast via the Web. In one particular interview on the Connecticut Bob weblog, a politician says to his interviewer on camera, "You have any idiot [that wants] to run against me in this town and I will crush them." This is the raw face of true everyday politicians in true everyday politics that would be seen rarely if ever via commercial media outlets - published by a computer network engineer with no particular qualifications as a publisher or a political expert other than his own abilities and enthusiasm.

Local and nationally focused political weblogs played a key role in 2006 elections, which saw Ned Lamont, a relative unknown citizen with only limited town-level political experience, run for the U.S. Senate. To get his party's nomination he had to face Senator Joseph Lieberman in a primary election. Lieberman, who had served in the Senate for twelve years and had been a candidate for U.S. Vice President in the 2000 election, was a very powerful politician on the national stage. It seemed to be a daunting task to take him on in a party primary. But the Lamont campaign provided an extraordinary challenge to his opponent by embracing bloggers as a key to communicating to local citizens and to gaining attention among political enthusiasts and media outlets in other parts of the nation.

Lamont wrote personally oftentimes on his campaigns own weblog, which included links to key local and national weblogs and attracted an enthusiastic community of commenters. Like in the 2004 elections Lamont leveraged this network of online political enthusiasts to gain thousands of small contributions rapidly and to build a network of campaign volunteers. Lamont made himself available to local bloggers on a frequent basis for video interviews that were uploaded to sites such as YouTube to provide a readily available outlet for his opinions. Nationally focused weblogs drew attention to local bloggers, who in turn drew attention to the national weblogs, creating a reinforcing cycle of attention to citizen-generated media. By contrast the Lieberman primary campaign made little use of independent weblogs, did not allow comments on their campaign weblog and in general relied upon Lieberman's decades of political and media connections to build support.

The result was staggering: Lamont defeated a three-term icon of Connecticut and national politics in the primary election by a narrow margin. However Lieberman then went on to win the general election for the Senate as an independent candidate by a healthy margin, leveraging his much larger base of established donors and support from national political supporters and local politicians to overwhelm the base of support that Lamont had been able to build through social media. Social media's power to change politics had taken a step forward in this particular campaign, but awaited a broader audience and more refinement to turn influence by citizens into broad leadership.

Content Nation Political Rule #4: Social media can build influential political support rapidly, but it requires a broad base of people in a community who use it and understand it to be completely effective.

A Police Incident Becomes a National Political Phenomenon: The Unyielding Eye of Social Media

One of the most potent aspects of social media from a political perspective is that any moment could become a political moment though the all-present eye of social media. George Orwell in his 1949 novel 1984 foresaw an era in which "Big Brother," a dictator in a police state, was using surveillance cameras to monitor the activities of all citizens. But with social media in many ways the tables of that fictional account have been turned: now the citizens of the world keep an eye on their governments and share what they see with fellow citizens - sometimes creating strong political reactions among citizens in the process.

In September 2007 John Kerry, a U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, was speaking at a form held at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. A student came to a microphone in the audience to ask Senator Kerry questions relating to the 2004 presidential election. After about 90 seconds of questions and quotes from a book that included some colorful language police in the auditorium grasped the student and carried the student to the rear of the auditorium, where they used an electronic taser weapon to subdue the student. "Don't tase me, bro'!" yelled the student as the police applied their weapon to him.

We know these facts because of videos recorded by students present at the forum who uploaded them to the YouTube video publishing service. It is reported that with 24 hours of it having been posted on YouTube the video had become the top virally distributed video on the Web. Versions of the incident were viewed, copied, shared and modified until various versions of it had reached more than 2.4 million people within a few days and millions more afterwards. The video became the inspiration of many "mashup" remixes of the footage into political songs and statements. Traditional media outlets reacted to the phenomenon and provided their own commentary from prominent political opinion-makers, but the footage of the incident itself and the remixes, comments and sharing by everyday citizens enabled them to make their own opinions of the incident with one another with relatively little intervention from political pundits. If a week in politics is a lifetime, as is said oftentimes, then in a week of intense viewing and participation the Web created a lifetime of political opinions nationwide about a local incident with little facilitation by traditional media and politicians. Citizens were making themselves aware of what was important politically.

Content Nation Political Rule #5: Through social media anyone's politics could become everyone's politics.

Showing Local Issues in a National Spotlight: BlackBox.org's Eye on Electronic Voting

Investigative reports are well known to most people who follow the news, but social media has given citizens the ability to focus on issues that most news outlets would ignore entirely or look at from just a local point of view. In many instances, though, political issues at a local issue found in many localities add up to nation-wide issues that require political action. Black Box Voting is a Web site set up by political activists concerned about how electronic voting machines are being used in U.S. elections. While the use of electronic voting has become a mandate of the national government in the U.S., the specific machines used for voting and their administration are the responsibility of local governments.

The founders of Black Box Voting started noticing at first issues in specific locations with electronic voting machines and then began to compile and investigate issues with voting machines and their administration that were being found across the nation. Black Box Voting makes extensive use of its own video recording of incidents and online forums to collect and disseminate information on problems with voting machines experienced by citizens. Today Black Box Voting is an influential citizen-driven national clearinghouse for information on electronic voting in the U.S. that continues to compile investigative reports of local problems found with electronic voting which add up to a national political issue.

Content Nation Political Rule #6: If you think that your politics are only local, social media can make you think again.

Follow the Money: Social Media Becomes an Engine for Citizen-Driven Fund-Raising

As much as modern American politics are known for their use of advertising and marketing techniques for spreading a political candidate's message, the key factor that has underwritten these efforts has been fund-raising. Without the massive amounts of funds  a campaign's advertising and communications don't get seen by citizens. In the 1960's U.S. political action committees, or PACs, started using mass marketing techniques to identify potential campaign donors based and contacting these donors through targeted direct mail campaigns very similar to those used for promoting commercial products and services. These techniques were highly successful and helped to raise millions in campaign funds in major elections. Direct marketing was complemented by traditional fund-raising efforts such as dinners where contributors to campaign committees would provide thousands of dollars to hear a candidate speak, appeals to leading businesses and trade associations and phone banks used to appeal to potential donors directly.

As the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 demonstrated that online fund-raising could bring in millions of dollars for a candidate running for national office from very small donations at a massive scale using social media techniques, this inspired political activists to try to extend the principles of social media fund-raising further to support a broader array of candidates and political issues. One of the most successful of these efforts to date has been ActBlue, which started in June of 2004 to build a system that would enable candidates and causes to set up their own Web-based funding networks and to receive small-donation funding from people nationwide. Within seconds any candidate or cause supported by ActBlue members can establish their online fund-raising capabilities, which they can connect to their own Web sites but also use through the ActBlue Web site and affiliated Web sites to encourage contributions. Weblogs supporting candidates and causes can embed ActBlue fund-raising tools, making any Web site, Weblog or other online publishing presence a potential fund-raising presence for any local or national candidate. ActBlue provides reporting and management functionality that simplifies reporting required by government election oversight organizations.

Since 2004, ActBlue has raised more than $56 million for a wide number of candidates, with full accountabiliy for the funds raised and easy viewing by anyone visiting the site of which people, weblogs and causes are supporting which candidates via ActBlue. The site enables a person to split a donation easily between candidates supported by a particular fundraiser, making it easy for local candidates to receive small donations from all across the country. So the personal endorsements of bloggers and others with influential political opinions can lend their endorsement to a group of political candidates to get others interested in their campaign efforts.

Comparable Web sites have been established recently by people who support candidates and causes from a different part of the political spectrum, but not without some early falures. RightRoots was a Web site that tried to emulate the ActBlue formula in a general sense but it lacked many of the citizen-directed features of ActBlue and had little interaction with political webloggers helping to raise funds. It was also supported by a a political action committee backed by the Associated Contracters and Builders, Inc., which gave the Web site less of a sense that it was empowering citizens. In January 2008 a new site called SlateCard was launched that incorporated many of the social media features of ActBlue, most especially being careful to position it as a technology to promote political fund-raising from citizen activists rather than promoting specific political issues itself. While early yet in its development SlateCard seems to be repeating the early successes of ActBlue for another group of citizens.

Content Nation Political Rule #7: If those who have the gold make the rules in politics, social media is putting citizens in the rule-making spot for campaigns large and small.

The Obama Campaign: Perfecting Social Media in Politics Means Listening to Citizens

In many ways the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was the culminating proof that social media has the power to transform politics as we have known them in an era of mass electronic communications. From viral videos to small-donor online fund-raising to organizing and training campaign volunteers to a vibrant online community all its own the Obama campaign demonstrated that it could use social media to support the success of a major political candidate in their efforts to win political battles against the most well-backed opponents focused on more traditional communications methods. Designed by one of the founders of the Facebook social media portal, the Obama campaign's use of social media was designed from its inception to be a highly influential and transformative tool for politics.

The philosophy of the Obama campaign's approach to social media has been one of "open source politics" - an allusion to the use of freely available programming code for many kinds of software that encourage open development of its capabilities from anyone. This meant that the Obama campaign would allow any member of their campaign Web site who followed simple ground rules for conduct to set up their own weblog on the campaign site, to form issue-oriented groups and to communicate and comment freely on the campaigns tactics. Since the site attracts mostly enthusiasts and active contributors, this turned out to be a huge plus for the most part, enabling citizens to inspire one another and to build enthusiasm for the campaign rapidly.

This openness created both challenges and opportunities for the Obama campaign. In June of 2008 some supporters of Senator Obama's campaign grew concerned about the strength of his support for changes to pending legislation addressing U.S. wiretapping laws. These members established a discussion group on the Obama campaign Web site that was asking Senator Obama to vote on the wiretapping legislation according to their views. Within a few days the group's membership had to more than ten thousand Obama supporters, becoming the most popular group on the Obama campaign Web site. This kind of influence usually comes from external sources of political insiders: here the citizens supporting Obama's campaign were exerting their own political influence through the campaign's own Web site.

The resolution of this issue in the short term was a simple and elegant solution: Senator Obama replied to this group in an entry on the campaign's own weblog which was posted by campaign staff. Many members of the campaign's Web site commented on Obama's blog and several campaign staff members replied to concerns, as Obama himself was not available at the time. In other words social media was used both to raise issues to influence a candidate and to enable the candidate to respond as a peer of that social media community. This was a political moment in every way, but one which demonstrated that the power of social media to enable citizens to have influential conversations with political leaders had reached unprecedented heights.

Content Nation Political Rule #8: Social media challenges politicians to use the empowerment of citizens to drive their own political power - a task that requires a willingness both to support and to engage in real conversations on real issues.

Bending Truth into Truthiness: Sponsored Social Media Corrupts Citizens' Conversations

One of the uncomfortable truths about politics is that oftentimes tools get turned into weapons very quickly. Social media has tremendous power to enable people to communicate honestly and openly in politics, but it also has the ability to enable political operatives to disguise themselves as everyday unaffiliated citizens while promoting their political point of view. As we saw in the chapter in marketing, this "astroturfing" inevitably creates as many problems as it tires to address, yet those who are used to publishing being a way to dictate a message to citizens will try to use social media for something other than genuiine political discussions.

One of the most common practices is for a political operative to pose as an unaffiliated individual and post comments or links to news stories in a social media service. The practice is widespread and difficult to stop, but oftentimes people practicing this are discovered or assumed by the members of a social media service to be representing more than their own interests.

An interesting instance of two political opponents getting caught in "astroturfing" occurred recently in a hotly contested battle for the U.S. Senate. The email address of a "Buck Smith" used to post comments on the Burnt Orange Report political weblog was traced back to an aide of Senator John Cornyn. However, in turn the Cornyn campaign discovered that an aide from the campaign of his Senate campaign opponent Rick Noriega had posed as a blogger under an assumed name to obtain information from the Cornyn campaign. Political affiliation is no guarantee as to who will try these techniques.

A larger problem in politics is the use of social media Web sites designed to appear as if they are representing an independent point of view without indicating the site's sponsorship by a political organization. An interesting example of this appeared in the 2008 U.S. presidential election when the Clinton Democrats Web site appeared. The Web site openly disavows any affiliation with the former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Hillary Clinton campaign disavows any affiliation with the Web site as well. Yet the Web site has weblogs and other social media aimed at the supporters of Hillary Clinton to dissuade them from supporting Barack Obama, the eventual nominee for her party's presidential bid. The weblog posts on this Web site are by anonymous figures and the Web site as a whole has no indication of its sponsorship. This type of Web site uses the tools of social media but clearly it is being used by political operatives to have their point of view appear to be coming from citizens rather than from their own organization.

Content Nation Political Rule #9: Social media publishing tools can become publishing weapons when politicians fear honest conversations with citizens.

Global Localism: Politics Shaped to Any Scale

The power of social media as a tool for politics is quite evident in the United States, not just from the ability of campaigns and bloggers to influence citizens but as well from the ability of individual citizens to influence one another without the intervention of politicians and the traditional media. I have given so far examples that apply mostly to the United States, but social media is a publishing phenomenon with global impact as well, most especially in developed nations with long-established traditions of open communications, but in other nations as well. While there are many nations whose governments control and monitor Web-based communications more closely than others, voices around the world are beginning to start making political statements in weblogs, videos and social networking communities. While government control of political communications is an important barrier to the growth of social media in many nations, a larger barrier may be culture: the concept of criticizing or challenging public figures is not something that comes naturally to many societies, both because of long-standing cultural traditions and fears of reprisals by the powerful. Yet even where there are such barriers, the inborn nature of humans to be publishers drives people inevitably towards social media as a political tool. 

Another factor pushing social media into the global political spotlight is the rapid expansion of a global economy that depends upon the efficient communications of the Internet and mobile communications networks to enable commerce. As the Web pushes ever further into the economies of the world's nations the benefits of social media outlined already for marketing and enterprises needing efficient communications The enormous benefits of having a nation's economy being driven by social media are pushing many nations towards more experimentation in social media that will lead inevitably to more political expression through social media. This enables everyday citizens from any community to build influence within their community and to extend that influence rapidly to people in in their own country and to other people around the world who share their interest in political goals.

Myanmar: Feet on the Ground and Awareness Around the World Through Social Media

The Union of Myanmar, known also as Burma, has experienced significant political unrest in recent years. In September 2007 demonstrations rose up in the streets of Myanmar, led by Buddhist monks and with participation by many citizens. The media of Myanmar, controlled closely by its government, did not provide accurate coverage of many of these events. But citizens equipped with text and video-enabled mobile phones and concealed video cameras were able to capture many key moments of the protests and to find ways to transfer them from their phones to people outside of the country. News and pictures made their way to the world's media organizations via the Web, which heightened the initial awareness of these events in the world and, for a time, in Myanmar. The interest of traditional media outlets was intense for a period of time, but then died down, as other headline-grabbing stories overtook stories from Myanmar. Social media had cracked open the doorway to world awareness via citizen publishing, but the door threatened to close as quickly as it opened.

That might have been the end of this story except for one key factor: although the eyes of traditional media may have looked elsewhere for novel stories, social media enabled people to continue to communicate their concern and their support for the people of Myanmar. One of the keys to accelerating the awareness of issues on an ongoing basis was the initiation of a fan page on the Facebook social networking service in September 2007 by a 19 year-old Canadian college student and a recent college graduate in the United Kingdom that focused on the monks' protests. From a start of just a few thousand members the group now counts more than 370,000 people who become aware of Myanmar issues through members of the group, which includes prominent CEOs as well as everyday people. Storms that killed thousands of people in Myanmar in May 2008 accelerated awareness of the plight of this nation, and helped to drive even more membership into the Facebook group, which assists with both issue awareness and fund-raising. Social media What was a curiosity in world headlines for a few days became a global cause through social media, helping to broaden political support from leaders in nations aware of the leadership and influence enabled by on an ongoing basis by social media.

Social Media Political Rule #10: Traditional media find political causes that pay for a few commercial breaks and then moves on.  Social media finds causes that can grow into movements that carry personal endorsements into lasting influence.

Where Politics can be Difficult: Global Social Media Paves the Way for Local Political Expression

In a world in which at least one nation's parliament is considering legislation that would provide the death penalty for anyone who in that nation who is found to be blogging, political expression via social media is not always easy to experience in every nation. Cultural barriers, lack of advanced technologies or fear of reprisals by political figures can also limit the willingness and ability of people to express themselves even when social media services are available locally. Where the world does seem to express itself politically with more openness is on social media Web sites that are more oriented towards global markets.

YouTube, the social media video service, has videos focusing on politics uploaded by its members from nations all around the world. News footage of legislators around the world fighting with one another in their meeting chambers is popular fare on YouTube, but the depth of political coverage goes much deeper than such novelties. There are already more than 2,600 videos on YouTube focused on politics in India, for example, many of them viewed by thousands of people with dozens of comments from YouTube members.

Some of the political videos on YouTube oriented toward India are clips of news shows or documentaries while others feqture personal interviews and footage of local political scenes. One political video, for example, is a local-language compilation of movie footage, news footage and local interviews relating to a proposed government project to dredge a shipping channel through what appears to be the remains of a legendary bridge celebrated in Hinduism. Viewed by over 4,000 people and with dozens of comments this video is typical of any number of politically oriented videos from around the world, available to a global audience on YouTube but focused on very local issues. There are already several Web sites within India which encourage sharing of politically oriented videos via social media features but YouTube's global presence puts it above local politics and social outlooks and gives its content a bridge to a global audience of Indian nationals as well, helping to drive viewership to levels above many social media video portals in India that are still in the early phases of development.

Another social media publishing service with a global focus is Orkut, which provides social networking, photo sharing and group discussions similar to other social media services. Orkut is popular in many nations across the world, including Pakistan, for which Orkut offers more than two dozen groups established that focus on politics in Pakistan. The largest of these groups has over a thousand members and features discussions both in English and in local languages, focused primarily on Pakistan's internal politics but also taking a look at how Pakistan's politics relate to global politics as well, giving people in Pakistan a bridge to a broader political outlook.

In the use of social media services such as YouTube and Orkut for local political concerns it is clear that people in Content Nation recognize that talking about politics openly as a citizen requires at times a sense of global empowerment, even when the audience for a particuar political statement may be quite local. People are glad to participate in their local and culture-specific politics via social media. In many ways social media helps people to preserve and accentuate a sense of localness and cultural tradition in approaching political issues. In a world in which open political expression via publishing is not something taken for granted in many cultures, though, globally oriented social media publishing services beyond the reach of local politicians can enable people to speak both to their own nation's citizens on local issues as well as to the citizens of the world. Whether through local or global services, in most every nation on earth there are social media enthusiasts who are learning how to express themselves politically through their own social media publishing.

Content Nation Political Rule #11: In a world filled with different cultures, global social media services can offer people steps towards political openness that may lead to more local openness.

Politics Beyond Borders: International Activism via Social Media

Al-Qaeda is well known as an organization dedicated to the overthrow of many governments around the world. With a form and organization known well to very few, its adherents are a shadowy group that speaks to the world through news outlets at times but otherwise seem to keep a very low profile in their communications. However, in some nations laws that protect the privacy of people using the Internet can be leveraged by Al-Qaeda to use social media Web sites that facilitate their communications with the world. The New York Times conducted an interview in 2008 with a secritive woman who had created her own "cause within a cause" to enlist women to join Al-Qaeda - an organization that does not openly admit to accepting women as members of their cause. Her Web site is a forum with over a thousand articles posted in which she exhorts people to join her political movement. A resident of Belgium, the Web site's founder is apparently under constant surveillance but continues to publish information to the world in her members-only forum.

Her words from her interview are a chilling reminder that social media has power that can have influence beyond the control of governments: "I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb." She is one lone voice in a very small minority of people using social media. Certainly we cannot afford to eliminate the power of social media because a handful of carefully monitored political extremists using it any more than we could afford to take mobile phones away from the people of the world. The power of social media to do good for the world far outweighs such negative views. Yet it should remind us that speaking out politically to a global audience can empower people with radical views as well as those with moderate views.

Content Nation Political Rule #12: The ability of anyone to communicate via social media to a global audience can have powerful political consequences that are difficult to control.

The Voice of Government: Learning How to Have Conversations with Citizens

Once someone has won a battle for political power...what then? Governments have long been the source of publications communicating the official policies of their nations, but as much as politics are a person-to-person art, many governments don't go a great job of having conversations with their citizens. Government officials will receive and respond to coorespandence, telephone calls and other communications from citizens but generally it's on the basis of one party having a great deal of power as an individual and the other not having much power at all as individuals. Even with "e-Government" initiatives taking hold in many nations, the emphasis is on outgoing communications for the most part, with not great advances in making more peer-to-peer contact between government officials and citizens.Yet social media is helping government officials to learn how to tap into the insights of their citizens - and to rub shoulders with them more effectively as they ready themselves for their next campaign for office.

New Zealand Police Act Review Wiki: Crowdsourced Legislation?

Call it a pioneering effort or call it a publicity stunt, the New Zealand Police got a lot of attention from around the world with their efforts at obtaining public feedback on changes to the regulations governing their operations via a wiki in September 2007. With anonymous contributions and heavy "policing" by police staff after a day's contributions the ensure clarity of language and organization the end result reflected some collective wisdom that helped to inform the revision of the 2008 New Zealand Policing Act. The built-in auditing features of the wiki made it possible for people viewing the wiki to understand the "before" and "after versions of page revisions. After two weeks of use the police closed the wiki and left the resulting documents online for people to view.

While the resulting legislation drew upon this experiment only for ideas, as well as from more traditional forms of feedback, some of the ideas collected via the wiki were provocative and reflected positive contributions such as the suggestion that "all citizens and residents of Aotearoa/New Zealand are obliged to help uphold the law, keep the peace, prevent crime, and bring offenders to justice." A suggestion that the minimum age for recruiting candidates for the police be raised to 25 gained wide note, but suggestions that "individuals will be given the legislative tools to help uphold the law by ensuring they can defend their property with whatever force is required without fear of being charged and can catch and hold criminals, even at the point of a gun until police arrive" did not gain as much notoriety.

If nothing else this exercise was a reminder that one of the key reasons for having representative governments - so that people can assemble legislation for self-governance - stems largely from an era in which the simple functionality of a wiki that allows collaborative editing of a document from any citizen did not exist. Does this mean that we're ready for the "wisdom of crowds" to assemble complex legislation that complex nations will have to live with for years to come? Perhaps not. But perhaps we are nearing the time when technologies such as wikis can be used to enable wider input into a wider range of legislation - and more accountability for who had their fingers in it.

Content Nation Political Rule #13: Just because social media brings the voice of the people to government doesn't mean that it's ready to replace our governments.Yet.

Webcameron: Trying to Reinvent a Political Party's Leadership with a Social Media Brand

Leading a major political party in any nation can be a challenge: leading it in the face being out of power for more than a decade can be more challenging yet. For the United Kingdom's David Cameron, part of the answer to this challenge is to attract people to the political party that he leads by using social media to engage existing and prospective constituents in a real dialogue about political issues. His Webcameron Web site is a step towards placing his party in the forefront of political social media.

At first glance you wouldn't think that it was a Web site about politics at all: slick graphics, extensive use of video, blogs with comments and links to major social media services where his materials can be found as well, it is the productization of politics cast in a social media light. The differences between this productization and the productization from political candidates in the 1960s couldn't be more striking: where the older political "brands" were about pre-packaging a candidate through market research, the David Cameron "brand" evolves through conversations with his politcal "market" - his constituencies. Instead of trying to sell a politician like a bar of soap Decameron helps citizens to tell a politician what kind of soap it is that they need and to get to know the soap craftsman through personal conversations. The result is, hopefully, a politician more aware of the real needs of citizens and better legislation to meet their needs.

Content Nation Political Rule #14: In the marketplace for political ideas, social media doesn't eliminate marketing: it just makes it more conversational.

Instant Messaging as a Political Medium: A Congressman Twitters His Way to Public Awareness

Like any member of the U.S. House of Representatives John Culberson is never more than two years away from facing an election in his congressional district in Texas. After he nears the completion of his fourth term in office Congressman Culberson still looks for ways to keep in touch with his consitutuents and to carry his brand of politics to a wider audience. John Culberson was the first member of the U.S. Congress to use the Twitter instant messaging service as a channel for his personal and political outlook. Members of Twitter can follow any other member on Twitter on an opt-in basis and receive their instant messages as they post them. This enables an individual to post one short text message from a mobile phone or a PC or other device connected to the Web and to have that message broadcast immediately to all their followers.

Congressman Culberson's Twitter messages reach a younger and technology-savvy group of voters, the kind of people who are influential in political opinion-making and who will represent the future of his political aspirations. He peppers his Twitter messages with personal observations - " Raising money campaigning and having fun!" - to more issue-oriented communications: "Awesome - thank you - with the worlds third largest oil reserves Iraq can certainly afford to pay much more of its own way." At the same time Congressman Culberson is alerting people following him about other activities that he's involved in using social media that they can experience as well as responding to questions from constituents and people curious to hear his political point of view. It's a method of keeping up conversations with citizens that he believes will have a major impact on politicians seeking to build a conversational relationship with citizens usually found only in trips home from Congress. With Twitter he gets to bring those local conversations with him right into the halls of Congress. As Congressman Culberson observes in one Twitter message: " I am trying to change the rules for representative gov't and put We the People in every room and every dark corner." "All politics is local," indeed.

Content Nation Political Rule #15: If you're in a position where you claim to be speaking for the people you had best be in a position to be speaking with the people on their own terms.

Politics in the Hands of Content Nation

Although social media has enormous potential to shape politics throughout the world in ways both large and small, it will not change the fundamental nature of politics from being the art of influencing people to attain a goal. The primary benefit of social media in politics is that the "selling" of political views by politicians is becoming less empowered than the "buying" of political views by citizens.

In the world of marketing social media helps to shape products and services into conversations that influence marketplaces already empowered by a wealth of publishing relationships at their disposal. In politics social media does likewise, providing a way for people to make their own informed political decisions using influence and information from peers as a key driver in their decision-making processes.

Political peers could be local and using a local language, or anywhere in the world using a common language to express political thoughts. Whatever the scope of their interest and actions, social media enables more groups around the world than ever before to think and act together as they shape the outcome of political matters. With social media any and all politics can become local politics - the politics of one person having personal influence over another.

We have seen now how social media is permeating our markets, our work lives and our politics: truly it is a phenomenon that is shaping the very nature of our world's societies. We are only at the very beginning of the growth of Content Nation, yet even so the outlines of a new kind of society are taking shape amongst its citizens.