One Million Strong For Your Name Here
BY Fred Stutzman | Monday, October 29 2007
The New York Times reports on Stephen Colbert's Facebook Group "1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert." Like anything Colbert, one should be cautious when drawing serious inferences, but the report begs a few questions. First, what does this "support" mean, and what does it say about political use of Facebook?
In the article, Mr. Colbert's groups is compared to the now-famous "(Barack Obama) One Million Strong for Barack" group, created months ago by supporter Farouk Olu Aregbe. While the growth of Mr. Obama's group has slowed (with about 380,000 members), Mr. Colbert's group enjoys 1.2 Million members - with continued growth certain to be spurred by media coverage. In fact, Mr. Colbert's group may very well continue to grow - I wouldn't be surprised if the group ends up with 4 or 5 million members. If it does, it will establish a new precedent for group size in Facebook, to my knowledge there's been nothing close to that size.
At a political level, comparing Mr. Obama and Mr. Colbert is patently unfair. To join Mr. Obama's group (or the other mega-political group, "Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)") requires an explicit statement of political beliefs. Joining Mr. Cobert's group signals that you're a fan of his hilarious TV personality. Of course, there's nothing wrong with this - but to comapre Obama and Colbert is truly to compare apples and oranges.
But what can we learn from these groups? Like Mr. Colbert's group, Mr. Obama's group grew extremely quickly, benefited by viral information spread in Facebook Newsfeeds. This is the main mode of information discovery in Facebook - the majority people who joined the group were not explicitly searching for a Stephen Colbert group (there are over 500). Rather, they were presented with the group their friends had joined, and elected to join as well. Of course, this group capitalizes on maximum name recognition of Mr. Colbert, currently out on the road promoting his new book.
So what if a candidate created a Facebook group, and in every speech and in every email they promoted the group - would we see a similar, viral phenomenon? While not on the scale of Mr. Colbert's group, I find it quite likely that a campaign could "engineer" significant growth of a group. The question that remains is what good the group serves. If these groups are little more than the "bumper stickers" on our profiles, are they worth candidate time and effort? I'm skeptical, but I'm not yet ready to write groups off completely.