Political campaigns are obsessed with two things: Telling every possible voter exactly what they want to hear in order to get them to the polls and cast the "right" vote, and telling them that message for as close to zero dollars as possible.
It's not a surprise, then, that Facebook has focused its social-Sauron eye on the world of politics. Already a focal point of political activity (of varying quality), the site has shifted its toolset to let campaigns target extremely specific audiences with very specific messages, for prices somewhat north of zero dollars. The end goal for the company seems clear: Replace, as much as possible, expensive, blanketed television advertising with much more immediate, much more specific ads appearing in users' feeds -- and then cash a whole lot of checks.
This is not as far in the future as you might think.
When Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) ran for reelection in 2008, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama was breaking new ground in using the web for engagement and fundraising. At that point, Facebook had only been available to the public at large for two years, and it was still largely self-contained: Pages didn't have built-in "Like" buttons, for example.
Six years later, Cornyn gave his campaign team the space to explore what had changed. "It was important to Senator Cornyn that we do digital right and that we innovate," Cornyn's campaign manager Brendan Steinhauser told us by phone. "When he sat down and he interviewed me, he said, 'I want to bring the Republican party into the 21st century when it comes to digital and when it comes to minority outreach,'" Steinhauser said of the senator. "He's a true believer in it."
To that end, the campaign used an external firm to match its voter list with Facebook users before the not-very-contested Republican primary against Rep. Steve Stockman. That system allowed them to contact hundreds of thousands of voters for under 20 cents a piece, much more cheaply than by mail (which costs at least 50 cents a piece, at the cheapest). Mail has historically been the best way to target specific voters, due to its relatively low cost and ability to easily pick out a particular group by address. Facebook let the campaign do that cheaper and with better feedback.
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