In my new job, social networking is a big part of what we’re building. We connect motivated individuals to causes they care about, particularly politicians, and quantify a volunteer’s volunteer time and network impact so their contributions can be recognized – much like financial contributions to campaigns are often recognized.

Up until now, building networks for our candidates has required a user to log in and proactively invite their friends to join. This is effort-intensive and has very few residual effects. A key to growing these networks is to provide ways for one-time effort to pay long-term dividends, and to find ways to extend the reach of a campaign well beyond the web space of the campaign. Landing pages that serve as a connecting point into the network are one step. The next step will be giving our users tools to channel people from their online communities toward this entrance to the network.

So today, I’d like to invite you to join the Perdue Online Action Center through my personal website. Nobody’s going to send you email unless you sign up for Perdue’s newsletter. Nobody but me will know that you joined unless you choose to build out your network or publish your own personal website. I’m quite interested to see how people use this and some of the other features we’re working on.