Internet Politics 101: The List vs The Network

Back in early September, Hillary Clinton's campaign made a big deal about how it had signed up its millionth supporter, a computer programmer from Georgia named Ron Wood. You can watch the video of Wood and his friend Michelle Smith meeting the Clintons, and traveling to a labor rally in Des Moines, here. Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent out an email bragging of the accomplishment: "What's the power of a million? It's the power to run a winning campaign; it's the power to restart the 21st century; it's the power to make history."

As best as I can recall, that's the only metric of grassroots organizing the Clinton campaign has ever shared with the public. And the news that it had, by September, built a million-member email list, was no small accomplishment. Until recently, that was every politician's goal: a huge list that you could hit up for donations and volunteers, again and again.

But compare the power of a list to the power of a network.

Right now, the Obama campaign boasts that more than 350,000 people have created personal accounts on My.BarackObama.com, more than 25,000 have created blogs on the site; more than 20,000 have created their own personal fundraising pages with their own goals, thermometers to track progress, and follow-up tools; more than 20,000 offline local events have been planned using related tools on the site; and more than 6,500 active grassroots volunteer groups have formed in support of Obama with more than 200,000 members.

To be purely schematic about it, let's posit that Clinton's giant list falls into this form of one-to-many communication, (Forgive me if this looks like it was sketched on a back of a napkin--but it's essentially an abstracted form of a graphic my partner Andrew Rasiej has been drawing for years in his efforts to get politicians to wake up to the power of the net.)

Here we have one speaker and many recipients. The conversation is all one-way. The citizens are isolated from each other, and the politician isn't do much to either introduce them to each other, or to respond to their feedback.

That was the paradigm of broadcast TV and direct mail fundraising. Now we're in a networked age, where everyone can connect to everyone else and expects some degree of interactivity and reciprocity. Further, the power is shifting away from the speaker at the top towards the network of connections forming among all the participants.

In practice, this converts in all kinds of ways to political power. A campaign can send an appeal to its million-member list, or it can foster a network of 20,000 small-donor activists, each with their own personal lists. If you assume that an email to a million people will have about a 20% open rate and a 20% click thru, that's 40,000 responses. Not bad. But people are far more likely to respond to a personal appeal from a friend or an acquaintance than an impersonal mass email.

To date, Obama's campaign has amassed more than 750,000 contributions from more than 500,000 individual donors. And that doesn't reflect whatever additional fundraising they've experienced since winning the Iowa caucus!

There's more power in a network than a list.