In the 90’s politicians wooed the MTV generation in a bid to win the vote of Generation X. Now, the battleground has moved on: it’s all about social networks and garnering as much support as possible using the least expensive method.

The early stages of the US Presidentials have shown us the way things are going. The 2009/10 UK General Election will see a shift in advertising spends from the main parties from mainstream media to digital media with a marked increase on social networking sites like Facebook. The appeal of building a presence on these platforms is not difficult to get to grips with. One user can reach thousands of “friends” within their network by adding an application that allows supporters to display their party allegiance, receive party updates and election briefings.

No serious US presidential candidate would be without these tools and in the UK both main parties already have their own Facebook applications. At present these have very few active users compared to their US counterparts; however, this will no doubt change over the next 12 months as we gear up to an election.

The London Mayoral race in May should be an interesting UK case study for this trend with Boris already having added his “Back Boris” application to Facebook. A well designed and well executed little app that pushes users towards his campaign website, the developers have used e-bay colours to package their candidate:

The key to all of this, as with any campaign is money. For the cost of one TV or Newspaper ad, you could develop thousands of these apps and the likelihood that they will engage with the viewer is much higher than it would be in a newspaper as the viewer is one click away from becoming a supporter or campaign contributor.

One of the most extreme examples of the political power that these platforms now possess is the recent spoof campaign by Stephen Colbert to run for President. The star of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has somehow managed to gather over a million supporters via networking sites like Facebook. One recent poll, (taken by Rasmussen Reports October 19–21) had Colbert receiving 13% as an independent running against Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Results were particularly high among respondents aged 18–29, where Colbert received 28% of the vote among likely voters in a Giuliani–Clinton contest. One reporter commented that if Colbert continues “gaining over 10% a week”, he should be leading the field before November is out.

The Facebook group “1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert” claims to be the fastest growing Facebook group in the site’s history, having averaged 78 new members per minute surpassing one million members on October 26, less than ten days after its creation. Colbert’s group grew at such a rapid rate that it led one Facebook representative to tell the New York Times that the group had begun “overloading one of our servers.” The achievement has been given as an example of the networking site’s “uncanny ability to mashup the serious and the silly aspects of everything it touches.” As of October 25, 2007, the group was the most popular political group on the site, outnumbering the 380,000 of Obama’s “1 Million Strong Group”, the 500,000 of “Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)” and the 615,000 of “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!”.

UK party strategists take note, the next election will be a whole new ball game.

Musicians, video directors, bloggers and comedians - we have a new big-kid joining myspace!

They go by the name of Network Rail and these guys are using a whole different approach to myspace - raising awareness for road safety.

After seeing a little advert on myspace for a new track entitled “Rush” by “DJ Riskee” which featured Lucy Pinder (one of my personal favourites), I thought I had to give it a whirl! The video starts with a young man driving his car through the city at a fast-pace passing by beautiful women, waving to them as they pass and engaging in a little banter with other female drivers on the road. While all this is going on, a trendy house-style track is being played in the background, appealing to myself and many other people my age. All the while, I’ve got my eyes open ready to see when Lucy Pinder makes an appearance. The video goes on a little more and the driver has now left the city at night and now finds himself driving down a country road. The whole video has been sped up to add to the effect.

The driver finally comes to a level crossing - where he then realises its too late to slow down. You hear the crash but don’t actually see it. The video finishes with the message “Level Crossings - Don’t run the risk!”.

I thought the concept and the way that this whole campaign has been carried out was excellent and extremely effective. I like many others was lured into watching this video, and I’m sure that this message has reached its target audience.

They also have a custom-style myspace layout. Unlike the many similar myspace profiles that we see day-to-day - this profile has got a very trendy unique design to it, once again appealing to people of my age group (21-30).

All in all… i take my hat off to these guys. They’ve put together an extremley serious message here and delivered it in a modern way using one of the biggest social platforms in the world today - myspace.

How many hours have I wasted on Facebook? Who knows? Of all the applications that should be developed for the site, the one that I should really have added is a timer that keeps track of the amont of time I’ve spent on the Social Networking site. For some people it has become a genuine addiction and what started out as keeping in touch with a few friends and checking out what they’ve been up to has turned into an obsession that borders on the ridiculous.

One blogger has come up with an excellent exit strategy for anyone who (like me) finds themselves in this position. Take a look at their 5 step guide to leaving Facebook.

Huge news from Google as the much anticipated presentation application has now been launched and added to their Google Docs portfolio. This is a massive step for Google and has been about two years in the making. It now means that Google can compete with Microsoft with each of their main applications with the added benefit of allowing simple and easy online collaboration for teams who are jointly working on documents at the same time. With a full audit history of who changed what and when + the ability to allow multiple changes to the same document at the same time, this is an extremely powerful set of tools.

We have had a little play with this already and it definitely hits the mark in terms of our expectations. It is really simple and easy to use. It lacks many of the more detailed functions that PowerPoint offers, for example, transitions and animations are not available yet, but the way we would use this tool is to prepare all content and info on the slides as a group and then export it to PowerPoint for one person to tidy up and finish off by sorting out the transitions and effects. Another useful benefit is that you will always have a copy of your presentation saved online somewhere so this can act as your back up instead of taking a bunch of paper copies to your big pitch.

Part of our role here at Score is to help our clients harness the newest and most powerful web-based technologies so we will definitely be introducing some of our clients to this new tool straight away. 

The long awaited missing tool from Google’s online docs and spreadsheets range is about to launched. Code-named “Presently” (a play on the Word-like “Writely” application that Google bought and used as its own), Google’s version of Powerpoint is reportedly days away from launch. In a report by the Inquirer it appears that Google intend to add their collaborative presentation application to their existing docs and spreadsheet offering very soon.

As a company versed in passing presentations around our own internal team and in many cases outside members of a pitch team (we do our fair share of joint-agency pitches) this launch is one that we have been waiting for since it was first announced that this project was in development back in 06. We are big evangelists of the power and simplicity of collaborate software or “cloud-based apps” and can’t wait to get cracking on this one.

For those of you that haven’t ventured into this space yet, think of it in this context; you will now be able to write one presentation, save it online where it is accessible to everyone working on the project and all members of the team will have the ability to add and edit the presentation in the one place (with a full audit trail in case someone makes a howler). You can then go to your client without the worry of back-ups and print-outs and simply log-in to your Google account and you’re away… Sounds good doesn’t it! Let’s see if Google have nailed this one and at the same time added another nail into the coffin of Microsoft’s application monopoly.