According to TIME Magazine, the website Facebook.com - super-popular with college students - will soon allow political campaigns to create Facebook profiles for their candidates.
Starting in September, politicians will be able to buy profiles on networking site Facebook.com accessible to its 8 million members. That should help pols court a group of voters who are hard to reach. Facebookers will be able to "friend" any candidate they like--linking to a profile as they would a classmate's. Facebook says politicians won't pay anything near the tens of thousands of dollars that corporate advertisers do to set up on the site.
In my mostly-former life in higher-ed, I learned about Facebook a few years ago. Basically, it's a social networking site that uses the college campus as the primary organizing logic. It's also ONLY available to students with a dot-edu email address (so no, you can't get an account.)
Numerous college students from all over the country regularly told me that they used Facebook to organize their friends, make new ones, and - most importantly - find out where the party is tonight. Student groups use Facebook to organize their activities, and campus political campaigns are now largely organized there, too.
This is big news for campaigns - especially since it sounds like there will be steep discounts. Time to dive in, folks.
Posted on July 13, 2006 in cool websites, generating traffic, grassroots organizing | See full archives
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