Some are familiar with the concept of “Influentials”, people who are opinion leaders. An excellent paper on the subject of using the internet in a political campaign is Putting Online Influentials to Work for Your Campaign prepared by the Institute for Democracy, Politics, and the Internet.
The concept that the internet has a much higher concentration of “Influentials” than the real world is completely believable.
If a political campaign accepts this as being true, it makes sense for it to use an internet presence to recruit and mobilize “Influentials”. This is because, if a campaign successfully accomplishes this, the “Influentials” will become macro campaigns, working to influence those around them.
This issue is interesting, and I am still thinking about this paper. The first question that came to mind was concerning the distribution of the “Influentials”. I think it is possible that the internet “Influentials” are not evenly distributed, maybe concentrated in urban areas or regions of the nation.
The D.C. area has to have more than its fair share of “Influentials”.
If this is the case, it may be worth targeting a campaign’s internet presence toward the over represented population.
More on “Influentials” to come…
Monday, July 11, 2005
Online “Influentials”
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1 comments:
I think you're right that online influentials may not be evenly distributed geographically. But, I'd venture to guess that there are at least one in ten persons in every community across the country who is considered an influential and at least has dial-up.
These folks may not forward the political emails they receive to their neighbors, but I'd be willing to bet they still spread the message in other ways (i.e. during phone conversations. writing letters to the editor, etc.).
It would be interesting to see the data on this though.
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