Mayoral hopefuls try social media to reach, organize and persuade

And, while the 2009 race will be the city's first in which social media play a major role, even campaign officials admit being uncertain whether they can turn Facebook friends and Twitter followers into voters. Facebook and Twitter accounts for the major candidates include everything from diehard supporters to spies from other campaigns to folks from far away locales with no connection to the campaign.

Grayson Daughters, a social media consultant in Atlanta, said the move to electronic communications in campaigns is so new no one knows what value it brings. Everybody knows they've got to do it, though.

"These are very, very powerful tools," Daughters said. "These are databases they have compiled. Once these people are in your database, you have access to them 24/7."

Alix Desulme, the elected clerk of North Miami Beach, Fla., falls into the random stranger Facebook friend.

Desulme is a fan of former state Sen. Kasim Reed. He signed up on Reed's Facebook page even though he admits he knows nothing about Reed or Atlanta politics. Still, he said Reed's campaign will get return from its efforts in social media.

"It's all about grassroots now," Desulme said. "Social networking adds to the momentum of any campaign plus is free advertising and it's a great outreach for younger voters."

Steven Grey of northwest Atlanta, however, is a supporter of Council President Lisa Borders and plans to vote for her. Grey said he joined Borders' Facebook page after a friend requested he check her out. He did and found out she was a candidate he could support. At that point, Grey said he signed up.

Grey said social media has not transformed him into a supporter or from a passive supporter to an active one. "It's possible it could persuade but it hasn't," Grey said.

Many still say you can't beat door-to-door canvassing and yard signs in local elections.

"A face-to-face ask is always going to trump anything else," said Liz Flowers, media director for the  Borders campaign. "But in a race of this size, that's difficult. If you can turn online support into off-line work, then it has value."

Former Atlanta mayor Sam Massell is so old-school he doesn't even carry a cell phone. He's fond of saying, "He who has the most yard signs wins" in local elections. He still believes that's true even in a day when it can be hard to have a conversation with three people without one reaching for her Blackberry.

Yard signs, Massell reasons, translate into direct support and votes and also increase name identification.

"A sign in a yard is an endorsement from 2 1/2 people," Massell said. "It affects passersby as well. Yard signs can be very effective."

Mark Rountree, a Gwinnett-based political consultant who normally works with Republicans but has worked for mayoral hopeful Borders, wonders about the value of social media like Twitter and Facebook. While home computers and Blackberrys seem omnipresent, not everybody feels comfortable communicating electronically.

"Around the office, I like to say the guy who spends the most time on the Web site is the guy who usually loses," Rountree said. "I don't think electronic communication ever replaces something tangible."

Still, Rountree says social media, Web sites and email blasts are becoming more critical to local campaigns. He thinks they have been effectively used to organize, empower and excite supporters but not bring in voters.

If Facebook fans translated directly into votes, Reed, the former state senator, would be sitting pretty instead of where polls show him, in third place.

Reed closed in on 5,000 Facebook supporters a month ago, before Borders, the council president, broke 2,500. Even now, Mary Norwood, the acknowledged frontrunner, barely registers on the digital count with about 1,000 Facebook fans.

Reese McCranie, with Reed's campaign, said he knows three-quarters of the folks on Reed's Facebook list are Atlanta residents. However, he can't be sure how many of that group can or will vote for his candidate and he knows that some of the names have to be from other campaigns.

"It's all about keeping supporters engaged and enthused about what's going on," McCranie said.

Social media, he said, allows the campaign to communicate daily with supporters and to easily hit them up for campaign cash. Supporters, he added, can persuade their friends to join up with a candidate through social media.

"There is some persuasion going on in social media," McCranie said.

Norwood may have the smallest online  audience, but polls show her with the widest, deepest support across the city. An eight-year council veteran after a long career in neighborhood activism, Norwood is the grass-roots candidate in the race. She cobbled together a citywide network of support by her tireless attendance at so many community events that even she has lost count.

Her campaign manager, Roman Levit, said Norwood's numbers are so low because she hasn't tried hard to get friends to connect to networks of friends and pump up the numbers. "We have chosen to put less focus on the electronic and more on the personal," Levit said. Norwood, he said, has made more than 7,000 personal calls.

The campaign has put out scores of yard signs all over the city, arguably creating the greatest presence with that very traditional campaign tool.

"I can't quantify what that gets you," Levit said. "But I know I'd rather have it than not."

While campaigns debate the value of yard signs versus Facebook and Twitter, at least those are communication tools largely under the candidates' control. Much of the electronic communication, through blog postings and comments to blogs, is not. And that can have candidates recoiling in horror and anger one moment and laughing hysterically the next.

There are at least half a dozen blogs that regularly post items about the mayor's race, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Political Insider.  The items are usually short, sometimes irreverent, other times serious.

The comments, though, are almost uniformly negative. They can read like the rantings of overly enthusiastic campaign workers juiced on caffeine and sitting on way too much free time.

Comments can be racist. They accuse candidates of everything from extramarital affairs to a lack of basic intelligence to having anger management issues. And, the posts are anonymous enabling campaign officials a rumor-creating avenue that gets more potent daily.

The campaigns all have folks who monitor the blogs and the comments, they acknowledge. But each denies having staffers devoted to making the same snarky, mean-spirited posts they say the other camps make.

Maurice Cherry, who runs digital media for Borders, calls the blogs "an interesting conundrum."

"What you get is pretty raw," Cherry said. Information, he noted, tends to spread quickly, then disappear as new blog posts push old ones off the page. At the same time, old posts never truly go away.

David All, a Washington-based political consultant who specializes in strategies, said Barack Obama's historic victory showed how social media can be used to gather, energize and inform supporters. He added it can also help turn supporters into donors and voters.

Social media campaigning, All said, is emerging as crucial to the campaigns from today going forward.

"A virtual yard sign is the same as being a supporter on Facebook," All said. "Yes they are real votes. Word of mouth is the oldest form of marketing. . . . Without a good social media strategy, you can't go anywhere."