New Facebook Game Makes You the Candidate, for Dog Catcher!

As someone who has blocked Farmville / Mafia Wars /Texas Hold’em Poker and defriened anyone with the audacity to send more than one invite, when I first learned of Campaigns the Game, a new Facebook application that allows users to “compete in online virtual elections,” I was skeptical but intrigued.

In brief, Campaigns is a free-mium game which allows Facebook users  to run for a real or imaginary elected office against their friends in virtual elections. Ironically, all users start off campaigning for dog catcher, which contrary to popular myth is not an elected office anywhere in the U.S. (In Peterborough, New Hampshire they do elect a Fence Viewer.)

In terms of the dynamics of the game, for anyone that has worked or volunteered for a local, state or national campaign, the developers have attempted to digitalize the typical tasks one must perform to win votes. For instance, you can ‘take action’ or click a button no more than 5 times in 6 hours to be awarded ‘votes’ for activities like giving a speech at a local high school or placing an advertisement.  After 5 such clicks, I earned 12 of the 20 votes it would take to become dog catcher.

At this point, in order to earn more votes and be elected dog catcher on Facebook,  I can upload a YouTube video and ask my friends to ‘like’ it to earn votes, wait 5 hours to engage in further slacktivism, spend real money  for votes, ask my friends to ‘donate’ their money or install the application. Like Farmville, you can spend money to unlock bonus features, which in this case is buying votes (The “best value” is $40 dollars for 65 campaigns points). The proceeds of these ‘donations’ I assume to be the profits for the developers. 

As also reported in the Huffington Post, founder Aaron Michel along with co-CEO’s Matt DiVito and Vincent Palermo have some ambitious plans for the application, including encouraging “more and better candidates to run for office,” and educating people about politics “without them knowing that they’re leaning.” They also are in talks with “high level Democrats, Republicans and non-profits” about partnership agreements. Although it remains to be seen whether or not the national parties will bite, if Campaigns the Game takes off, it could potentially be an excellent place to target political advertisements.

Considering the application’s design, technology and usability,  unlike Farmville- Campaigns is hosted entirely inside Facebook and as such I experienced some occasional performance lags in testing it out. Overall the integration with Facebook works fairly well. Usability wise, the ability to upload videos and request ‘likes’ and be awarded votes from your friends is the most interesting feature. (I wouldn’t mind reviewing funny videos by my friends to be elected dog catcher.) Personally I think the other actions you can take to earn votes need to require more than a click. Replacing this with an online scavenger hunt might help. Instead of a click, you would need to canvass the Facebook profiles of real life candidates to answer random trivia questions. For instance: “What was Nancy Pelosi / John Boehner’s last Facebook update?” The answer to this would get you X votes.

Secondly, will people consider this a game or  Facebook political spam?  Will you pay to win this online game?

With politics, people are generally either interested in the process side of campaigns and elections or they are not. On the other hand, farming on Facebook is far more popular online than in real life. With Farmville, as best I can tell the main appeal is competitive. Your farm will be better than everyone else’s. Before Zynga could monetize the app, they first had to reach a critical mass of users to make Farmville competitive and valuable to advertisers. Given the energy Matt and his team are promoting Campaigns the Game and the growing buzz over the midterm elections, they have more than a fair chance.

2010 AMP Summit: From the attendee perspective

If my own and the @bivings tweets hasn’t already tipped you off, I was fortunate to spend last Friday and Saturday at the inaugural AMP Summit. Organized by our friends at the David All Group and a distinguished leadership committee including Joe Trippi, Jerome Armstrong, Robert Bluey, Peter Corbett, Peter Greenberger, Todd Herman, Bruce Mehlman, Leslie Sanchez and Jonah Seiger, the AMP Summit built on the successes of several conferences related to technology, politics and government.

In terms of critiquing the AMP Summit, David All and his team deserve a lot of credit for effectively managing and mitigating many of the little things that irritate frequent conference goers / networking junkies. In short, it is obvious that the organizers of the  AMP Summit made a decision not to cut corners and put a great deal of thought into making the experience of attendees as smooth as possible. The organization of breakout sessions into four separate tracks (Activism-Media-Politics-Lab) and categorization of panels by their focus (Case Study, How-To, Thought) was generally accurate and useful for attendees to determine their schedules.  

The speakers were all subject matter experts who delivered interesting presentations while also leaving more time for Q&A than you typically see. The lunch hour and 30 minute breaks between panels provided for plenty of time to talk to presenters,  network with other attendees or catch up on work emails without feeling the need to dash off to your next event. Rather than trying to cram as much as possible into the summit, there was a clear focus on quality instead of quantity. The location was easily accessible via public transportation and the conference took place in a reserved area of the hotel. The food was excellent and the Starbucks coffee was kept warm and flowing all day. Networking receptions and choice of locations was absolutely fantastic (iPad DJ @ranajune rocks!).

On the minus side, having the second day take place on a Saturday was something many attendees did not commit too. However, the smaller crowd made for more intimate discussions with panelists and even better networking among those who stayed around. Although it technically made for a 6 day work week, it is tough to imagine a better or more productive way to spend your Saturday afternoon.

Other areas for improvement include the ever vexing problem of providing quality Wi-Fi that can handle
hundreds of high bandwidth users. For next year’s AMP Summit, having the ability to connect your Facebook & Twitter accounts in order to create & share your schedule (SCHED in DC Week) and then network and connect with other attendees (Gov 2.0 Attendee Directory) would be truly valuable.  Finally for those of us who live-tweet these events, having the speakers’ Twitter handles ahead of time and the presentations to view afterwards would be a big timesaver.

All in all, AMP was a good and welcome entrance to the world of technology conferences. Just like no one individual or organization has a monopoly on the internet, no one brand or organization has a monopoly on tech conferences. As an added bonus, AMP was wise to create hype for next year by awarding prior attendees with “Level 2” privileges next year.

For more on AMP check out the conference blog & Facebook Page and OhMyGov’s recap “The AMP Summit in 50 Tweets.”

Slurp140 & Twitter Analysis of DC Mayor’s Race- Part 1

In terms of the ability of social networks and online advertising to serve as predictors for the success or failure of candidates at the polls, the general consensus is that while the Internet alone will not necessarily predict the winner, leaving the online space to your competitor is a good way to lose money and support. In other words, a campaign that is not well organized online is probably not well organized off-line.

On August 26th we deployed Slurp140 to start tracking mentions of Mayor Adrian Fenty and City Council Chairman Vince Gray. Since then, as of 11am today have seen a total of 4,696 tweets by 1,896 people that specifically mention a candidate by name or include the hash-tags #dcmayor or #dcdebate. If your looking for an easy way to follow the campaigns down the home stretch on Twitter, please check out Slurp140 and let us know what you think!

As most of us would agree, one of the most important factors for a political candidate is authenticity, especially in regards to Twitter accounts.  In this respect, the official Twitter accounts of Mayor Fenty and Chairman Gray leave much to be desired, as it is clear that both are largely, if not exclusively maintained by staffers. With a little over 9 hours to go until the polls close, Slurp140 is ranking @Fenty2010 slightly ahead with 124 tweets and 1,577 mentions and @GrayforMayor with 85 tweets and 1348 mentions since August 26th. Overall, @Fenty2010 is followed by 852 people and following 943 while @GrayforMayor is followed by 923 people and following 921.
Surveying a few popular Twitter ranking services leads to some potentially interesting insights:

According to Tweetlevel:

@Fenty2010 receives: Influence score of 56.3, Popularity score of 42.2, Engagement of 44.9 and Trust: 45.4

@GrayforMayor receives: Influence score of 55.2 Popularity score of 43, Engagement of 46.5 and Trust: 43.6

According to Klout:

@Fenty2010 has a Klout score of 12 and classification as a “Dabbler” which is defined as someone who: “Might just be starting out with the social web of maybe you’re not that into it. If you want to grow your influence, try engaging with your audience and sharing more content.”

@GrayforMayor has a Klout score of 26 and classification as a “Conversationalist” which is defined as “You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.”

According to Tweetreach:

@Fenty2010 has reached 15,006 people via his last 50 tweets and 27,703 Impressions

@GrayforMayor has reached 14,125 people via his last 50 tweets and 29,951 Impressions

For partisans and political junkies, taking the Klout score analysis for both candidate somewhat out of context aligns surprisingly well with the narratives about the candidates and campaigns we have seen in the media. For instance, Klout states that @Fenty2010 “Needs to engage more with others or be more active to gain influence,” while @GrayforMayor “Is influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger.”

Reposted from our Impact Watch Blog. Impact Watch gives you the power to monitor and measure all of your traditional and social media coverage in real-time from an easy-to-use online dashboard.

Gov 2.0 Summit 2010 – A Twitter Recap

 

Tracking News in Realtime: Discovery Gunman

After first noticing Tweets relating to the developing story of a gunman storming the Discovery Channel building not far from our office in Georgetown, we have launched another instance of Slurp140 dedicated to tracking all tweets using the #discovery hashtag: http://www.slurp140.com/discovery/ 

For live video, our friends at TBD have been doing an excellent job: “Live Video: Discovery Channel gunman hostage standoff”

A couple quick thoughts:

• A picture from @jdivenerea purporting to be of the gunman has received over 27,339 views in 1 hour and 50 minutes.  Watching the commentary unfold, a rough consensus has formed that this may actually be of an undercover police officer. http://yfrog.com/2mhdmdj

• The alleged shooters- James Jay Lee’s  Myspace profile and personal website (http://savetheplanetprotest.com/) have emerged. The website as a single page of hate speech, that has since crashed due to high traffic. Huffington Post has reposted the text in full. other sites have posted the text in full.
• DCist points out that the suspect has a prior history of being arrested at the Discovery Channel building
• Since we started tracking tweets shortly after TBG broke the story at 1:00pm, we have seen 9,000+ tweets by 5,477 people