Phil de Vellis and Jonathan Schilling are influential individuals. You can become one too.
TechPresident has an excellent article this week looking at how individual internet users like Phil de Vellis aka ParkRidge47 and Jonathan Schilling aka Wasted_Time_R have come to have a profound impact on political campaigns.
In the post The New Influencers, Fred Stutzman of TechPresident writes:
Over the past two weeks, ParkRidge47 has effectively and persuasively illustrated the role voter-generated content will play in race to 2008. With over 2.3M views at time of writing, his 1984 culture-jack has become the canonical example of a voter-generated content coup. And while ParkRidge47 deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his work, it is important to remember that his is just one piece in an evolving story - why, the laughable Anti-Obama version of the ad has over 380k views despite its one-star rating. Over the course of the 2008 campaigns, we'll see many of these new influencers emerge.
Stutzman also points out that other individuals, like Schilling have had a profound impact on shaping the identity of certain presidential candidates in the 2008 race. Why: Schilling has been a steady editor of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Rudy Giuliani’s Wikipedia entries – And where do people go when they look for information about a candidate? You know the answer: Wikipedia!
Start editing!