Who's Really in Demand? It's Hillary (on Eventful)!
BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, March 1 2007
Barack Obama may have more friends than Hillary Clinton on MySpace, but right now the Senator from New York has 30 times more people demanding that she do a political appearance in their city than the Senator from Illinois, according to Eventful.com. She's got 581 people who have used the site to post a "demand" for her, compared to just 19 for Obama. (John Edwards, for all his campaign's vaunted savvy about Web 2.0 and social networking sites, has just 5 people demanding he do an event in their town.) Below is a screen grab of the top five political figures currently in demand through the site.
I expect these numbers to change rapidly as soon as the campaigns and their grass-roots supporters get wind of what a cool tool Eventful is providing with its "demand" function. Not only can you find more than a million listings of events on Eventful (which makes it one of the biggest event database aggregators in the world), including more than 10,000 political events that the site is helpfully displaying on a Google map that they just unveiled today (see below), you can express your desire for a future event to happen simply by using the site's demand button, which appears next to every "performer" listed. Eventful has naturally already caught on among musicians and other artists, but with the roll-out of Eventful Politics, this is likely to change. Call it voter-relationship management from the bottom-up!
Eventful also smartly makes it very easy for users to put that "demand" button on their own pages, which, I'm told, is why Hillary Clinton is doing so well on the site right now. "Someone in our office reached out to the person running Hillary Clinton's MySpace page," Jed Sundwall, Eventful's Manager of Strategic Projects. He blogs a bit more about it here. So far, he says, none of the campaigns themselves have been in touch with the company, but that will undoubtedly change very soon.
The comments that people along with their demands for these politics are also really interesting. To some degree, like other examples of politics 2.0 online, these will be "gamed" by the campaigns to reflect well on their candidates. But right now, the territory is pretty virgin and, I think, the voter comments pretty genuine.
So, the question arises, will the campaigns embrace the demands coming up from their grassroots for the candidate to fit them into their schedule? It wouldn't be hard to do. If one campaign does it, I predict Eventful Demand could be to 2008 what Meetup was to 2004.