The YouTube debates attest to the shifting demands of the younger voters, and so far haven’t really have a positive or a negative impact on any one candidate. (Note: the Republican debate is not scheduled until next month, so this might not be true after that) However, of all the other prime examples of social media’s impact, the outcome has been bad for the candidate in all but 1 example: The Obama facebook app. And of those negative outcomes, Giuliani’s and Obama’s mishaps were quickly brushed under the rug and forgotten about by the general populous. Only George Allen’s colossal collapse has had lasting effects on the political spectrum of the US: he had quite the margin over his opponent, but after this YouTube coup d’etat he began a swift downward spiral that lead to his defeat.

Despite all the buzz about the evolution of politics into a web-centric endeavor, so far the only real evidence of this comes from fundraising results and the huge amount of money that people are donating online. My guess is that more and more people are doing their banking, shopping, bill-paying, and donating online and this is just a natural shift of convenience for most donors. How many examples exist of a campaign really making positive change or causing a shift in real public opinion because of a movement initiated or propagated by social media?

If social media really has a huge positive impact of the upcoming presidential race, I’m wondering why we aren’t talking about the possibility of President Paul. Looking at any graph of online social presence, Ron Paul always comes in as either first or second. One of these graphs that I’ve encountered that I really like because it shows its own breakdown is this one compiled based on MySpace friends, YouTube subscribers, Eventful supporters, Flickr results, Facebook friends, and Digg pages:

I am a huge supporter of online social media and social networking tools, but I’m unconvinced about their effectiveness up to this point. There hasn’t been any evidence that Ron Paul’s huge online popularity has resulted in much of a real-world rally or surge in support. So far, campaigns have not used these tools as real campaigning venues but have instead resigned to use them only as a way for current supporters to show their support in an online world. The problem is that these people have already made up their minds. Sure, it is good to make sure that your supporters are vocal about their support, but the entire purpose of a campaign is to expand your support base, not just corral the base you have.

It is time for campaigns to branch out, grow their brands, actively pursue new supporters, and energize the ones they have. This won’t happen by more of the same-old-same-old. The buzzphrase in the blogosphere these days is ‘Openness’: whether this is referring to sites like facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Hi5 opening up their platforms to independent developers, corporate CEOs blogging about their companies (or just life in general), or the need for a portable online identity, Openness has become the battle cry of the web-faithful.

Along this line of thinking, it is time for candidates to open up. While I understand that candidates surely have busy lives: trying to run the country in Washington, while at the same time convincing a few million people that they should like you well enough to entrust the next four years of our country in your hands. Sounds pretty daunting…but when was the last time anyone so much as trusted a stranger to watch a cart in a grocery store? How can you trust someone with the country when you don’t know things like their favorite food or what color car they drive?

It might not seem like it would matter all that much what someone’s favorite food is, but after you learn that little fact, that person becomes a little bit more human in your mind. Candidates are people too, and it is about time that they started showing that to the world. Look at most candidates’ facebook or MySpace profiles and you will see that they are rigid, pre-canned compilations of a stump speech. I don’t think it would kill them to take 5 minutes out of a day and fill out their profiles by themselves…because I know that a candidate wants to fix Social Security, I don’t need them to include it is their ‘Interests’ section of a profile. I would much rather learn that one of them loves watching Olympic curling or some other obscure fact that I didn’t know before.

This goes beyond just profiles…Obama’s twitter updates read more like a press release than an insightful look at the campaign trail. Maybe I’m demanding a bit much, but it seems like he could take 30 seconds of each day to update on everyday life rather than a staffer throwing out the press event of the week. I will praise the Obama camp for at least showing up to the social media party…even if they are dressed a bit funny and don’t quiet fit in with the cool kids, at least they came out to say hello.

The bottom line is that campaigns are dropping the ball in the social media world and whoever picks it up will have the chance to really change the way we deal politics in America. That day is coming though it will be a long time before retail politics totally gives way to online identities, if candidates will put a bit of personality into their online presence maybe they will be able to actually reach out and pull in some new supporters. All those independents in the US already see the public face of candidates every time they turn on a TV or read the CNN RSS feed…they don’t need a second helping of the same thing everywhere else they look.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the tweet about the above graphic.

• Steve Forbes is predicting that the 2008 presidential election will consist of Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg.

• MySpace has hit 200 million users. This is big news…that is more people than the individual population of every country in the world except Indonesia, the United States, India, and China. I couldn’t find any verification of this outside of Mashable, but it seems to be on par with their historical growth pattern.

• Tila Tequila is getting her own show on MTV…nevermind the content: the underlying breakthrough here is that she got famous because of MySpace. She was a not-so-famous Playboy model until she was one of the first few hundred thousand people on MySpace and she posted a few scandalous pictures and invited a few thousand people to the site. According to Time, she gave the site the kick it needed to jump from obscurity to the ‘cool kids’ table’…and now she has over 2 million ‘friends’ on the site and markets her music to them, and sells it exclusive on iTunes. This makes her the first person ever to rise from total obscurity and establish a multimedia ‘empire’ via social networking tools. This is a big deal…but the only story that will be in the news is the show’s content.

• Facebook has finally gotten to making the application login page more user-friendly and less buggy by transforming it into an AJAX popup window: apprently this isnt widely launched yet, but it is coming down the pipeline.

Update: Altered formatting to make it more ‘list-like’ -ac

17% of respondents said they had looked at a candidate’s profile on some social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, and 53% of them said they were more likely to vote for that candidate after seeing their profile! 53% of those who had looked is equal to approximately 9% of the total survey sample, which may sound low, but MySpace has well over 100 million users and Facebook boasts 35 million (and growing by approx. 1 million/wk), so a 9% win-over rate is a pretty health showing! (I realize that not all users are in the US, or registered voters, etc…but you get the idea that it is a lot of people)

What might be the most astonishing statistic to come out of this survey is that 62% of those people who browsed a candidate’s profile, were over the age of 30! This is a huge development that shows how much these online arenas will be changing the political world int he near future. The are no longer a child’s playground, but adults are using them too…if it were all college-aged users browsing these profiles, the numbers wouldn’t be very exciting since the 18-27 age bracket is the least democratically involved at the polls. However, the 30-45 age bracket is very active in elections, making these survey results very important to the upcoming election.

One thing to say about this survey, however, is that I haven’t seen the actual text of the complete survey or the methodology behind it, so I can’t vouch for its integrity. And it may well be that people who look at candidates’ profiles were more inclined to vote for them before and that is what drove them to the site…but even if this is the case, this data shows that the face of politics is changing in America.

The emergence of the YouTube debates, the explosion of social networking site users, and the expansion of each candidate’s online presence is a sign that the old-media way of vetting candidate’s is shifting and the public is adopting its own way of doing things. With the hotly contested elections in the recent past, it is very possible that whoever manages to capture the largest portion of that 9% of users could tip the election in their favor by the slimmest of margins…and we are still over a year away from the general election: there could be ways of voter organization and online political advertising that we haven’t even though of yet that could spring up and have a major impact on the 2008 election.

As social networking sites increase in popularity, more and more businesses are striving to maintain worker productivity by simply blocking access to sites such as Facebook and MySpace. This week, an Australian firm released a study claiming that Facebook usage costs Australian businesses $4 billion in lost productivity…Mashable posted a good analysis of the study:

“An Internet security company, SurfControl, looked into the issue, and it estimates that Australian employees spend approximately one hour a day on the social networking site. Using that number, they come up with the slack time costing employers approximately $5 billion Australian ($4 billion US) a year in lost productivity.

How they reached this mysterious number is, just that, a mystery. The study lists that there are 800,000 businesses in Australia, and they are estimating one slacking employee per company. A problem with this estimate is that Facebook only currently lists approximately 224,000 members from Down Under, and then you still have to assume each one of those people is a very active user of the site.

Of course, the fact that this firm sells a web and email blocking system may explain some of it.”

-originally posted by Mashable 

If this is indeed the methodology used in this study, I’m certain that any second-year college student with basic research skills (or even younger, if they have a decent level of commons sense) would be able to point out a plethora of fundamental flaws in this research design. Honestly, even if I ran a company whose business was controlling workplace net traffic, I would not release this study, if only to keep my company’s name off such an ineptly created statistic.

This is merely the latest push to stem the rising tide of social network users. Over the past year, companies all over the world have made efforts to block access to sites like Facebook, in fact, in Britain an estimated 70% of firms have blocked or limited access to Facebook. Despite the efforts to keep them off, however, users are simply getting more creative at accessing the site…the moral of the story is that you can’t fight social shifts: Rock’n'Roll won because of Elvis and the Beatles, user-generated media is winning because of Wikipedia and Digg, and social networking will win because of Facebook and (dare I say it…) MySpace.

It will be interesting to see how the balance is reached in the future between workers and firms each trying to balance their priorities. Maybe we will see a more widely-adopted Google model of running a company…