My posts concerning MyBO (My Barack Obama) sparked many comments and some great conversation. So much so that I figured I would put my money where my mouth is and actually sign up for the social network.
To clarify, I am currently an undecided voter. I did vote in the Massachusetts Primary, and it was not for Mr. Obama. Now that we are headed towards the general election I’m doing even more research to determine who will get my vote (very vote counts people!). I figured joining the network will allow me to interact with other folks and get their perspective. At the same time I continue to involve myself in what is going on in the Clinton and McCain camps. As I venture into MyBO I wanted to share with you what I’m seeing, what works, what doesn’t and in the end if it means I’ll pencil in #2 graphite into the circle representing Obama.
Today is Day #1 in MyBO experiment, which meant I (bold represents my overall suggestions for a social network):
Registered: VERY easy to do and they ask for minimal information, although I wonder if my zip code was in one of the swing states if I would have immediately been asked to donate my first born. The first and most important lesson for any social network or social media tool is to make it fast and easy to get started, you can always ask folks to give more info once they are actually using!
Set up my profile: Here is what I wrote when they asked me why I was supporting Obama: “I actually do not support him at this point, but I’m using this social network to determine who I should support.” This was also the place that I listed my important ‘hot topics’…these were surprisingly general and vague, which goes against everything I know about voters. In order to allow folks to find each other based on personality it is important to ask some specific questions that helps in the searching function.
Saw my Obama Score: This is cute, and effective with any minimal knowledge of human behavior. You get points for each “action” you take on the network, i.e. when I set up my profile I got 25pts. But they also tell me that I only need one more point to move up in my ranking (currently I’m tied for 175,404th). I immediately looked for ways to move up! I can’t see who is number one on the list though, that would be helpful because I would like to ‘friend’ that person. Driving folks to put in more information can be as simple as a silly ranking and point structure!
Reached out to Friends: You can add friends of course into your network, you can even upload contacts from email, although this approach failed for me twice. There is a “Find Friend” function that allowed me numerous criteria, including folks who live near me. If you want to spark community you have to make it easy for me to search for like-minded folks AND for people already in my other communities.
Set up my blog: The site allows you to post a ‘blog’, I’m using that to repost what I post here about MyBO in hopes of seeing interaction on the site. Well, d’uh, you need to allow folks to post up thoughts on their social network.
I did not go very deep yet and I’m not finding anyone I know on the network to ‘friend’, so I’m going to post up some thoughts and see if people find me, it will be an interesting test. If you are on MyBO, check me out HERE.
–Kyle Flaherty
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March 13th, 2008 at 9:57 am
The link to your MyBO page isn’t working for me. I also couldn’t find you in a search, trying “KyleFlaherty,” “Kyle Flaherty,” and “Engage in Politics.” If you want to add me, my screen name is “BryanPerson.”
Kind of discouraging and unhelpful that I can’t find you unless I know your exact screen name or zip code.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Hmmm, interesting. That certainly would be a deterrent. I did search by your name and found you, but you are right, it needs to be much easier.
I can’t even determine what my public profile URL actually is?
/kff
March 13th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Ahh, so you’re screen name is “Kyle.” Yikes, this really isn’t very easy at all!