Normally, I’d be fairly bummed if someone’s response to our software was “It doesn’t suck”. Mashable’s review of Team Rudy, which runs on the Wildfire platform we’ve built at WeTheCitizens, says precisely this, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Once Mark Hopkins gets through panning most presidential campaigns’ social web presences, he goes on to say, “[Giuliani] has one thing that few other candidates have presently: a kick-ass social network… and I’ve got to be honest: although I’m not a Giuliani supporter, this thing almost makes me want to be one.” I’ve heard this several times since we launched – even people who don’t have strong ties to Rudy have been drawn in and found the site addictive. The people who really do support Mayor Giuliani? Well, they’re really using the heck out of the site.  Two prolific users already have a personal teams of 131 other users, other users have shot up the rankings by bringing several rock star supporters into the network.  In just 2 weeks, the best supporters have already made half the “personal impact” that our best users from the Perdue campaign made in several months.
Thanks in particular to the Giuliani Team, who have helped tremendously by finding creative new ways to keep the application fresh, give supporters plenty to do, and really bring our software to life.

Team Rudy launched last week as an online community and activity hub for Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign (coverage at TechPresident and The Blog Street Journal. We at WeTheCitizens are very excited to be involved in promoting the leading Republican candidate using our Social Mobilization technology. The social networking aspects of our product are sufficient to let supporters join, invite their friends, and engage and communicate with the online community, but where I am most excited about our product in action is where we’re combining activity from our site, their site, and the offline world to quantify how much a user’s volunteer efforts are worth to the campaign. Up until this point, the campaign has been making very effective use of the staff-facing application to coordinate voter and supporter outreach activities (scaling the app to handle robust outreach to 170 million registered voters has been a very compelling engineering effort), but it’s very exciting to be able to highlight the supporter side of our software that and of my friends, family, and readers can use.

In our engagement with Governor Sonny Perdue, the product was used effectively as a loose integration between a CRM system and a social network, but the latest version of our product is becoming something fundamentally different. We’ve given our customers greater freedom to motivate their supporters to help, and reward and recognize those contributions. They can use the volunteer opportunities that are built into our product, and augment that with any other volunteer opportunities that they want. The supporter network is increasingly about giving people opportunities to help our customers’ cause and motivate their friends to do so as well, and less about online chatting and other social network fluff.
We have at least a couple more customer launches in the months ahead, and I look forward to highlighting the unique ways they use our platform to draw users in through their social relationships, engage them in a variety of volunteer activities, recognize their biggest supporters, and leverage that information for even more effective results.