Social Media Club Phoenix had a meeting tonight devoted to discussing the influence of social media on politics. Among the major themes that emerged:

1)MySpace is going to vote candidates “off the island” between now and the primaries.  We figured out (roughly) that MySpace has 150,000,000 users, most of whom are in the US.  If that’s true, or if even 100 million are in the US, and half of them are voting age, MySpace has more potential voters than America. What influence would it have if one of the candidates was voted out by MySpacers?

2)Candidates still don’t know what they are doing with social media.  The fact that John Edwards and Barack Obama are on Twitter means nothing, unless they discuss issues. Who cares if they are in San Diego today?

3)Dennis Kucinich blogs about important issues and is trying to use social media to do his job.  He’s all over the contaminated pet food issue.

4)As long at the campaigns think they control the messages, nothing will change.  Unless some campaign is blindsided by  a gaffe that becomes viral. What’s needed is a conversation between candidates and constituencies, nota new medium that candidates can use to “get their messages out.”

5)The current debates are like an offline version of Twitter.  No one can say enough to explain anything.

6)Politics used to be discussed around the dinner table, but now your kids are multi-tasking with all their devices and a campaign would have to really laser in to get their attention.  Music may be the way to do it.  Or perhaps video.  For the younger generation, it’s probably not blogging.

7)The vaunted “wisdom of crowds” doesn’t necessarily produce the best candidate; it just prevents us from getting a truly awful solution. The candidate of the committee is the camel.

Thanks to everyone who attended.  Next month: discussion of cool companies doing cool things in social media.