Following on from the Obama blog the other day and having finished 2 books by Patrick Dixon in the last week or so – I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of politics. (Yes, I’m aware I need to get out more)

As the pace of change increases people seem to be looking for things that make them feel like they can make a difference in this uncertain world.

On twitter today, from 10-11am David Cameron was giving a new conference at Reuters, you could ask a question by using the #askdc hashtag*- mine was: “Do you think that the strength of single issue politics has made the current political party system useless?”

*hashtag – the # character and a short sequence of characters that acts, like a tag allowing you to easily group tweets from a variety of people on one subject. It allows you to create a conversation for a specific theme or event i.e. conferences often use tags like #myconf09. You can then search and see replies to that specific hashtag, which is a lot easier than wading through pages with relevant words that might not be related to that specific idea. you can use twitter search to find #tags or hashtags.org.

Technology enables single issue politics.

Take the Baby P example – the issue prompted people to sign up to facebook groups (2000+ I believe in one local group related to baby P) and generally soak up the media “outrage” (I hate using quotes but I do feel these were heavily stoked by sensationalist reporting) without actually doing much.

Of the 2000+ people who joined the dorset march for baby p facebook group, around 20 people showed up to the actual protest. Is this mobilisation of the masses? Hardly.

You often hear people say that more people vote on a big brother final than in a general elections (Not true btw: 2.7million vs about 18million) – this is possibly true for younger age groups where it is ESTIMATED that more young people aged 18-34 voted on BB than in the last election.

All of these things do add up, technology has created a world where issues are picked up and shared at such a pace, it must be almost impossible for politicians to keep up.

Voter apathy is caused by the politicians responses to these single issues rarely differing and the perception (and reality) that most political discussion is just shallow point scoring on detail and scandal.

Would it not be better to enable the masses to vote on single issues in some central way and just have MPs as representatives of their local area only and not as an illusion of some political ideal?

Or would this be creating a state by mob rule, based on sensationalised news bites?

UPDATED: X factor voting – 16.5million votes cast across the series – be interesting to know how many voters that was.

A good friend of mine Neil posted on his blog at www.neilcocker.co.uk today about Bebo, and its development since its aquisition by AOL.  His point was that since the takeover (all $850m of it), it has failed to grow at all, in terms of members, and he wondered exactly what AOL were doing with it.  I was reminded of a similar situation closer to home- around 2000, friendsreunited was the UK’s social network darling; everyone I know was on it, and in fact there was a time when it was constantly in the news for various controversies, usually to do with romantic flames being rekindled, or exes getting revenge.  It too was initially started by a small team, and acquired by a corporate for a large amount of money (ITV bought it for £120m in 2005).  The effect on that site has been even more marked, at least anecdotally.  While the likes of Facebook and Bebo developed the social networking paradigm to cater to an increasingly sophisticated and global audience, friendsreunited trailed behind, and although their traffic has increased to record levels since a recent relaunch which included many of the features expected by users of web 2.0 social networking sites (link), I cannot but help wonder how it could have been if ITV had moved faster.  I’m convinced that it is the nature of ownership of the likes of Facebook, and the initial husband and wife team at friendsreunited that drives their success, and this passion and ability to move fast are lost on the huge corporates.

What I think this means for business is that you have to be ahead of the curve.  However much your marketing department think they know online, and understand SN, there’s always something around the corner that is bigger and better, and the guerilla nature of these new sites means that only those with their fingers at the bleeding edge can identify exactly where your efforts, and most importantly your spend should be going.  Sites like friendsreunited and Bebo still have their place in an integrated SN campaign.  But where will they be in a year’s time?  More importantly, will Facebook still be #1 in a year’s time?  Or is there a niche up and coming SN that will reward insider knowledge with a higher return on investment, and a more credible campaign?

When a website adds the feature to allow comments to websites, it’s not really news.

When change.gov adds comments, its interesting… when they use the IntenseDebate system as their comment system it is exciting.

IntenseDebate uses threaded comments and user profiles, with community ranking to ensure that quality comments are most prominent as well as telling you what a commenter’s reputation is next to each comment.

I have to take my hat off to Obama and his team for really embracing democracy in this way, enabling a real conversation where anyone can add their thoughts and by truly embracing community to manage those comments. Good work.

There is plenty of ongoing discussion about how to moderate comments on blogs and the legal issues around who is liable etc.  IntenseDebate doesn’t solve/answer all of those issues, but it does represent a great step forward – not only that, it supports OpenID and a number of other cool “2.0” type features.

If you’d like to read more on change.gov’s use of this technology, see also techPresident’s excellent article.

Its always good to hear of examples of how businesses use LinkedIn for real (and tangible) benefit.

Take this example:

One of the other members asked a question about what people thought was the best product in a certain field. 4 out of the 5 responses recomended my clients product. From a PR point of view that is great, but it also enabled me to identify the person asking the question, the company they work for and their office location.

How valuable can that be?

excerpt from weetpr

Now that’s good to hear. I bang on about using Q+A on LinkedIn to generate interest, promote yourself as a centre of authority and to get leads in my seminars.

…I can’t take direct credit for this particular lead, but the blogger had attended my seminar in November…

Which leads me nicely to mention my next seminar on Social Media Marketing (exploiting social networking to the benefit of your business) as one of three speakers at the Original Business Thinking Event on 29th Jan.

So if you’d like to learn more about how you can use social networking in your business, follow the link above or drop me an email.

There’s a lot written today about Facebook launching their new service Connect.

Connect allows you to login to partner websites using your Facebook account and for information to flow from that site into your feed and friend information to pass back to the partner site.  This is part of a wider plan by Facebook to become the standard for social interaction.

OpenID set out to be the standard for connecting people across the web, plenty of big name partners supported OpenID but yet… outside the industry, who knows it exists?

There’s another important part of the strategy for net domination, that hasn’t received as much discussion: Facebook are taking steps to reduce the amount of people using ordinary Facebook accounts as a promotional tool. They are really clamping down on fake profiles and have put in places limits for how many group messages you can send out rather than using updates or advertisements.

The real strength in Facebook is in having 99.999% of users as real people, that is what makes it stand out from most other networks.

If Facebook can keep the balance of community vs commercial messages right, people will stay. A lot of users left MySpace when the volume of messages that were “hey you’ve never heard of me but please check out my tracks” overtook the messages between friends.

Sure some people will be put out when their profiles are deleted (after being warned) BUT it won’t cause the bulk of people to move.

This brings me nicely back to my talk, the social web in 10 slides – where I talk about the importance of interacting and engaging with the community in the right way.

If you (as a business) want to promote yourself on a social network, you have to be really clear to understand how that network works and how best to mobilise that network for your benefit whilst playing by their rules.