There was a great article in yesterdays New York Times on the impact of social media on this season’s political campaign. The poster child (almost literally) is Chris Hughes, the 24 year old wunderkind who is one of the founders of Facebook and the mastermind behind Obama’s internet campaign. Regardless of your political views, it is hard not to be impressed with what he has accomplished on behalf of his candidate. Talk about a groundswell, 90% of donations were under $100 - 40% were less than $25 and 10,000 people gave $5 or $10 which has led him to rake in more than $300 million to date. (Bank of America and American Express are also quite happy, with each pocketing millions in fees since most of these on line donations are via credit card.)

The article made a number of interesting points about how Hughes has engineered a group of 1 million people on Facebook who have declared themselves a “friend” of the Obama campaign and engaged 900,000 members to My.BarakObama.com also known as MyBo which has created a central location where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund raising pages.

What I thought was most interesting though was something that Chris Hughes said in response to all of his success. When asked about the role of technology in crafting his strategy, he commented that without the emotional connection to his candidate, the technology would be meaningless. Technology just enables people with an interest in Obama to come together and show their support. Facebook is one of the channels that Hughes has used to build some momentum, but his main online success for Obama has come from MyBo built on the same founding prinicpes as Facebook – “keep it real, and keep it local”. MyBo is its own social network where people come to get updates, recruit friends, and rally supporters for local events.

It sounds like such an obvious point but that really is the brilliance of the strategy that Hughes has masterminded. Truth be told, the notion of informal and formal networks, clubs and other social groups is nothing new. People have always come together around common interests and causes, whether they are personal, professional or political in nature. In fact, one of the first social clubs was established in England in 1862 as a way for men to gather and learn new skills related to their trade (and, of course have a libation or two). The Suffragettes were a group of women who had a passion about gaining the right to vote. Instead of building web sites, they burned down churches, threw themselves in front of horses and refused to pay their taxes in order to gather the momentum they needed to change the Constitution. A technology platform like Facebook or the world wide web would have made it a lot easier (and probably a lot safer) for these women to make their voices heard, but it obviously did not stop them from taking action for something about which they cared deeply.

The takeaway I think from reading this piece and observing history is that technology in many ways is the easy part of building social networks and that the difficulty lies in creating an engaged, enthusiastic, user-friendly community. It is projected that there will be more than 250,000 niche social networks formed over the next 18 months, all organized by people with a passion for surfing, or running, or cooking or antiquing or even shoe shopping. Not all of them will survive, and even fewer will ever make any money but those that do will have taken a page from the Hughes playbook and will have recognized that technology is an enabler, not the silver bullet.