enlarge Courtesy Meredith Segal

Meredith Segal created a Facebook group that urged the election of Barack Obama. Tens of thousands joined, and Segal became the national director of Students for Obama.

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Meredith Segal

Meredith Segal admits that it was difficult at first to get other Bowdoin College students to share her passion for the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.

It was 2006, and Obama was a newly elected U.S. senator from Illinois with a presidential candidacy that was, at best, a dream.

"When I would mention it to friends, the most common response would be, 'Who? What? Well, OK,' " said Segal, who grew up in Cumberland.

So Segal went online, logged into her Facebook account and created a group, "Barack Obama for President in 2008." A few fellow members of the social networking site signed up, and Segal encouraged them to tell friends. Within weeks, membership was growing by leaps and bounds.

Segal recalls sitting in the college library one night, refreshing the page on the Facebook group and seeing that hundreds of people had signed up in just a few minutes.

By the time Obama officially announced his candidacy in February 2007, Segal had introduced him at a college rally in Washington, had nearly 60,000 students nationwide signed up for the Facebook group and had become the national director of Students for Obama, an arm of the campaign that mobilized a group of voters and volunteers.

Segal ended up running a field office for the campaign in Philadelphia, helping to nail down the critical state of Pennsylvania for Obama.

Segal said she's always followed politics, and volunteered for the unsuccessful candidacy of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., four years ago. That was when she first heard Obama, who was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that nominated Kerry.

Obama "seemed to care about the interests that were most important to me and he seemed very genuine," said Segal, now 22.

Stirring up interest through Facebook made sense to Segal, who believes her generation is more politically active than it's given credit for. Older people just don't know where to find the high school and college students who are engaged, she said.

"Do they really hang out at msnbc.com or cnn.com?" she said. "Young people aren't at those places, so if we want to engage young people in politics, why not bring it to the place where they do hang out and they feel comfortable?"

Segal said she intended the Facebook group as a sort of online petition, with the goal of getting people to support an effort to draft Obama into the race.

When it became clear that Obama was going to run, members of the group started telling Segal, "I want to do something more," so she encouraged them to work to create campus groups to support the campaign.

Using the Internet to support a candidate – especially one who didn't initially have the support of the party establishment – is a natural for younger activists, said Richard Skinner, a professor of government at Bowdoin.

"It used to be that if you did not have some sort of pre-existing institution like, say, a church to build on, this (effort) required a lot of money and expertise," Skinner said. The Internet allows an individual to build a nationwide organization cheaply, like Segal did, he said.

The entire Obama campaign used technology skillfully to reach younger voters, Skinner said, and two out of three voters younger than 30 supported Obama.

"It's something the Republicans are more than a little nervous about because they generally haven't done as well using the Internet in the last few years as Democrats have," he said.

The approach is considered "high-touch," Skinner added, since supporters are encouraged to recruit friends into online groups or forward e-mails. People are more receptive to information or invitations from people they know, he said.

Segal said she saw that in action the night before the election in Philadelphia. She was about to close the campaign office – at 4 a.m. – when she got a call from some students...