You know that one Facebook friend of yours who’s always posting political things? You know, the one who shows up in your newsfeed every single day? Well they may be calling you now to chat politics, thanks to Amicus. The New York-based start-up is syncing Facebook with voter data and using demographics to connect the right people.
Amicus got its start in 2011 with $580,000, thanks to a handful of investors, according to TechCrunch.org. The goal? Using volunteers’ Facebook friends to create a list of people to call when soliciting political donations or volunteers. This way, it’s not just a stranger on the other end of the line; it’s a friend (or at least a Facebook friend), who is considerably harder to hang up on. The company’s founders explained it best at the New York Tech meet-up last October.
The technology banks on some interesting findings – that mere acquaintances can be more influential (so, most of your Facebook friends) than a close friend. And the system appears to be working, according Amicus’ CEO Seth Bannon, who said that the groups who have used it have seen volunteer increases of 50 percent.
So will the person who calls you using Amicus be representing either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? Probably not, mostly because presidential campaigns already have access to extensive databases (Obama’s Narwhal technology, for example), and it’s still a new system. But maybe by 2016? Time will tell, of course, but that gives you plenty of time to unfriend that one really, really politically active friend.
Image via Flickr