1.2 Million Refrigerator Boxes for Stephen Colbert

In my last post, I talked about comedian Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report's run for the Presidency. The big news over the weekend was that his Facebook group, 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert, actually reached a million members (one of which is me) - a feat no serious Presidential candidate has been able to achieve, as I noticed here.

Colbert commented on this, saying, "it took only 8 days for my group to triple the 400,000 members in Obama's group, and and only 8 seconds to triple the number of members in Gravel's group, One Refrigerator Box for Mike Gravel."

This New York Times article quotes a Facebook spokeswoman who says that Colbert's group was so popular it overloaded Facebook's servers for a brief period. The article's author, Brian Stelter, remarks that this is "the kind of grassroots support that the established candidates can only dream of."

And, speaking as a member of Colbert's "one million strong" group but no others, Stephen Colbert is the type of candidate us Facebookers can only dream of.

Even More on Facebook!

Scott Shrake of the Huffington Post wrote an amusing article analyzing the popularity of candidates on Facebook. Shrake approaches Facebook as an outsider, since he is outside the normal demographic, and also just recently joined the site. But he decided to check out the politics on Facebook, since young people think traditional polls are "lame."

Though Shrake readily admits his data isn't exactly scientific, the observations he makes match up with what I found in my first post about Facebook. Obama is the most popular candidate on Facebook, since his supporters are so active online. The "one million strong" group for Obama has about 375,000 members, the closest to a million out of any of the purported "one million strong" groups.

Surprisingly, when I put "one million strong" into the search engine for Facebook groups, the first group that came up wasn't Obama's, but an anti-Hillary Clinton group. As Shrake mentions in his article, the divisiveness over Hillary Clinton reigns on the web.

Facebook, Part Two: Ron Paul Edition

In my last post, I talked about how Obama and Clinton easily have the highest numbers of supporters on Facebook's politics application. What I didn't mention, though, was the surprising candidate with the third most supporters on Facebook: Republican Ron Paul, with about 28,000.

I think the internet is perfect for nonconformist candidates like Ron Paul who don't follow the party line and don't have name recognition. Ben Worthen, a business technology blogger for the Wall Street Journal, agrees with this idea in this post. Worthen calls the internet "the great equalizing medium" and said that businesses and other politicians could learn from Paul's approach to Web 2.0, which allows supporters to interact with the campaign and feel engaged.

It's no surprise that Ron Paul supporters are described in this article as "clogging Internet straw polls." And it's also no surprise that, in the same article, Ron Paul is quoted as saying "the internet ought to be left free." Since so many of Ron Paul's supporters utilize the internet for his campaign, it makes sense that he supports this medium.

Politics and... Facebook?

Like most college students, I have a profile on the networking site Facebook. But unlike most college students on Facebook, I haven't added any of their new application features. These applications let you rate your top friends, attack said friends with zombies, or buy them a virtual drink, to name a few, all while cluttering your profile page with graphics.

Today, though, I decided to check out the Politics application that Facebook offers. By adding this application, Facebookers can browse Facebook profiles of different candidates, select which candidates they support (the equivalent of "friending" them), and have their choices shown on their profile.

The candidates' profile pages serve essentially the same purpose as a candidate web site, except that Facebook allows them to be less formal, so they can quote their favorite Bible verses, tell us that they like to watch 24, and get Wall comments. Personally, I'd enjoy it if the candidates truly used Facebook the way college students typically do, so you could get into a poke war with them or send them pointless virtual gifts like lava lamps.

One thing I noticed was that Barack Obama has by far the most supporters on Facebook, with about 150,000. Distantly in second is Hillary Clinton, with about 45,000 supporters. In a previous post, I noted that Obama won the youth vote in a Yahoo! online-only poll, as well as winning the poll itself, because young people were the most likely group to view the debate and vote in the poll. It looks like the same is true for the politics application on Facebook.