Networking the vote

Millennial voters turn to mobile social networks for political persuasion

By the presidential election this year in November, one-third of the millennial generation, those born between 1982 and 2003, will be eligible to vote. In the following election in 2012, the entire cohort – the largest generation in United States history – will be legal and able to exercise their political prowess. To reach this sizable demographic, candidates, companies and carriers are increasingly looking to combining youth’s most ubiquitous platform, the mobile phone, with their favorite pastime, social networking.

Mobile social networking application provider Upoc Networks recently teamed up with Rock the Vote to use wireless applications and social networking to engage the U.S.’s 45 million youth in the 2008 presidential election. Upoc will provide the back office integration for apps including event alerts targeted by state, instant public opinion polls and quizzes with Rock the Vote.

Rock the Vote is leveraging Upoc, what CEO Steve Spencer calls the social networking vehicle for its three million registered users who don’t spend all day in front of a PC, to get mobile users registered and in the voting stations come election day. While the site does have a PC presence, the crux of the community is purely mobile. Subscribers to the service, on the deck of most major U.S. carriers, interact through SMS, WAP sites and widgets on other social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Users can interact with groups centered on a certain subject or partake in their own microblog online.

Political candidates from both parties for have used Upoc as long as the site has been in existence. In 2004, Howard Dean, one of the first Internet-focused presidential candidates, worked with the social network to set up wireless alerts and chat groups, as well as a microsite devoted to the campaign. According to Spencer, mobile has proven the most effective way to reach Upoc’s increasingly wireless youth demographic.

“We have enough tools at our disposal to be able to quickly adjust whether it is polls, quizzes or alerts, moderaton or chatting or other items that can be applied for the youth demographic,” Spencer said. “We find that this is a demographic that knows how to type on their phone better than a keyboard. It is not unusual to find in this demographic people who get a couple thousand messages a month from Upoc, if not more. These people are often very, very engaged in their social networks. It is primarily mobile – 90-plus percent of the sending of messages and the reading of messages in our community happens on the mobile device.”

According to a study released today by Frost & Sullivan, revenue from on-deck mobile social networking services, like Upoc, will reach $412 million in 2012. The study credited the popularity of Internet social networking services, increasing mobile web penetration and the emergence of mobile advertising as the catalysts for the on-deck social networking services. As such, the cell phone for politics has become a more viable platform to reach all users of all ages.

“Everyone has a phone, it is very personalized device, they have it with them 24/7,” said Julie Ask, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research. “It is very easy to reach people. Barack and Hilary both are doing good things around reminders if they have debates on TV tonight of if they’re going to be on the Daily Show or David Letterman, whoever it may be. They are sending out results of different states. They are doing a good job of using it to reach out to folks.”

Through the Rock the Vote partnership, mobile users can register to vote through a shortcode, as well as receive reminders on election dates and primaries in particular states. Rock the Vote also does data analysis on the impact of mobile Web activity to monitor voter trends. Something as simple as an SMS reminder to vote has significantly increased the actual turnout in many states, Spencer said. The Upoc campaign complements a host of other events and promotions, primarily through music venues, that Rock the Vote does to build political awareness. Rock the Vote has been employing the “Text to Turnout” wireless capability since the run-up to the Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont primaries on March 4, and in advance of next week’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

“The main idea is to build the Rock the Vote database as large as possible in their demographic and then through social networking techniques that we bring, to engage that community through polls, quizzes, alerts, chats and anything else in our toolbox for social networking to target them based on location as necessary and to get these people to be register and actually have them vote,” Spencer said.

NBC News and MSNBC also recognized the power of social networking by last week partnering with MySpace to create an election-related destination on the social-networking powerhouse’s site. The information hub, incorporated into MySpace’s Impact channel, will include news, analysis, live election coverage and discussion about politics with a focus on MySpace’s 100 million users, many of whom represent the youth vote. The site also offers the chance to do their own reporting and contribute to forms, blogs and polls.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama, a favorite among the youngest voters, has also brought the idea of fundraising over the Internet to the mainstream, Spencer said. Hillary Clinton's campaign, too, has gotten on board with Internet fundraising, just last week receiving an unprecedented $10 million over the Internet in the 24 hours after she won the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania. The Internet has been a fundraising and information-delivery vehicle for years, but new applications and the extension to mobility is another significant driver to its prominence in this year’s election.

“What is difference about this election from year’s past is the adoption of things like YouTube is much higher, use of social networking sites is much higher, user-generated content and use of video is higher,” Ask said. “User-created content, as well as video, are probably the two biggest difference from four years back. Social networking and community stuff, the Web 2.0 perspective, people can create content and forward things and have widgets on their sites and YouTube and so forth.”

As sources like MySpace and YouTube overtake other traditional outlets of political information to the youth voters, candidates are not the only ones taking notice. Authors Michael Hais and Morley Winograd this month published a book entitled Millennial Makeover, MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics, about the intersection of technology and politics in this year’s election and how it has given the millennial generation new power to shape American politics with social networks.

According to the authors, there' are a million more millennials than boomers and the generation is made up of 40% African-American, Asian, Latino or mixed race with one in five having an immigrant parent. With more immigrating to the U.S., the generation keeps getting bigger. This generation also has more self-identified liberals than the past four generations. Where social networks come into play is in this generation’s consensus-oriented attitude.

“As Millennials become the target demographic for all types of media, this approach to creating as well as absorbing content and information without filtering by experts will soon become the way all of America prefers to get its information,” the book’s introduction reads. “The presidential campaign of 2008 is the first real test of the willingness of candidates to embrace social networking technologies, and the generation that uses them, as Millennials become a significant portion of the electorate.”