Poets And Plumbers / MySpace.

I just hosted a seminar alongside Poets and Plumbers. It was all about MySpace – where are they at right now, how do they view their position in the Danish market (dominated by Facebook) and finally – and most interestingly – what they future holds for one of the grand old players on the social networking scene.

I must say, I’m pretty impressed by the plans forming at MySpace, and by their aproach when it comes to localisation. As the image shows, MySpace are comitted to a local presence in a host of different markets (Denmark among others), and actually managed to become THE social network in Germany, probably because of a very early localised version.

Anyhoo – watch out for MySpace in 09. There are some very interesting things just around the corner. Especially if you’re into music. Actually, if you can get your hands on an American I.P. adress you can check out some of the new stuff already.

Personally, I could do without the super polished blog posts, the overly edited and TV-like Youtube vids, the head shots on Flickr (I want to see the pictures you TAKE, not pictures of you!), but at least social software has a significant role in this election – I guess we’ll get round to proper and credible use next time.

All that aside, there are two things that interest me the most this time around:

Microblogging

I wrote about this before, but from an American perspective.

I would LOVE to see a candidate or two start using microblogging actively in this campaign.

[UPDATE: Turns out Naser Khader is micro blogging on ZYB - interesting choice of platform. I'd love to hear the reasons behind it - and The Conservatives are on Twitter (it's embedded into a very heavy site, so I didn't notice at first... but at least they've made sure to test everything before they launched ]

The candidates may not have the time it takes to build communities around their twitter accounts (since Jaiku is in private beta, Twitter seems to be the only logical choice in terms of platforms [!]), but I think a heck of a lot can be gained from importing tweets into regular websites and blogs – especially since the candidates will be out and about for the next three weeks, with limited time in front of their laptops. Microblogging could well be a powerful tool.

The use of social networking services

Facebook groups are emerging, and Danish candidates ar rallying for support in already established networks, which, at least when it comes to parties with limited funds, is a brilliant strategy.

How it evolves and how successful it turns out to be is anyones guess. First of all I think it depends on the level of participation and commitment of candidates themselves. But hey, that’s old news, right?

Looking forward to seeing how much of a difference online social networks can make in a three week campaign. And whether or not any of the candidates dare engage in campaign twittering!