The election was announced.
I noted it and went on my merry way. Election schmelection. I’ve never been heavily into politics. I have a bit of a tough time buying anything politicos say in a platform pronouncement or… well, generally in the public.
Yet, here I was, and the election was announced. I sighed with a certainty that the next month and a half would be filled with bad commercials, scraggly lawn decor, and a neverending flow of political commentary on my beloved CBC.
But then Stephen Harper joined Twitter.
All of the sudden, the Prime Minister himself was the talk of my tiny “town”, a feed where little politics – let alone any actual political figure – is ever discussed.
But no, it didn’t stop there.
Layton came next, followed by May, then LiberalTour (or at least that’s the order in which they started following me) – and after the realsies, a couple of renegades (@FakeSteveHarper, @FakeJackLayton, @FakeStephanDion) joined in as well. My wee world had been infiltrated…
And suddenly I found myself following them all back.
Though the tool was used lightly by some candidates – and I witnessed a major social media faux pas when Layton was Twittering during the French debates sans device – it still showed me that at least the candidate parties had started noticing (if not actually entirely listening to) where their public was going – and what they cared about.
And you know what? It made me care. More than any television report could. More than any newspaper could. More than any viral celebrity video ever could.
In the interest of social research (and, admittedly, my own voting decision) I spent a fair number of hours reviewing elements of the candidates e-communications. I investigated websites, Twitter profiles, their Facebook tools, their source code, those they were following – the whole online persona/package consistency. The election was no longer about the platform or the least infuriating commercial – it was about choosing a candidate who could tell me a good story and report information to me in a method that was convenient. To me. Today.
I’ll never tell you how the parties’ new communications strategies affected my vote on Tuesday, but I can guarantee you that I wasn’t the only one paying attention.
Entries
October 17th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
It was great to see the parties joining on Twitter, and to see Susan Ormiston’s (somewhat flawed) Twitter election coverage, but the problem is that while the parties are starting to use these technologies, they still aren’t using them effectively. For one, they seem a little lost as to how the public actually uses social media. For instance, on Twitter, @remarkk commented to @elizabethmay “Congratulations for being the only leader who ACTUALLY uses Twitter properly.” (http://is.gd/4gCm)
What’s more, while the parties tried a little bit, they weren’t really effective in touching the vast majority of the internet generation. From the Globe & Mail on Sept 24:
“Just 9 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 25 said a party had reached out to them using e-mail, text message, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter during the first week of the federal election campaign.”
Nine percent?! That’s brutal! Especially considering 83% of respondents said they had a Facebook profile, a cell phone, and used the internet as their main source of information.
Marc Chalifoux (Dominion Institute’s new Executive Director) has it bang-on:
“For all the talk, the political parties haven’t caught up [...] New media is offering a golden opportunity to essentially go where young people are in the online space, and we’re finding Canadian political parties simply aren’t occupying that space.”
And honestly, I doubt most businesses are doing much better than our political parties. Opportunities to actually connect with the public and discover what they think and want are just slipping through all our fingers like so much sand. (Generation Y sand, I suppose. Haha…)
October 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Oh god, that’s totally true – the bulk of organizations (political, business, etc.) are still having a tough time understanding how to use non-traditional media effectively. Yet without baby steps, they can’t get to doing it right. I personally found the fake leaders far more engaging than the real ones, but I did appreciate that they were trying.
The NDP, I think, took a neat approach with that Orange Room site, which really brought it all together in a way the other parties weren’t doing. That said, it was still far from perfect.
I’d agree that the mass public is still very much in the learning curve phase of trying to use this stuff – that much is clear to everyone. But in learning lies opportunity – and the first ones to take the baby steps will likely also be among the first to get it right. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow – but it’ll happen!
October 20th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Haha, I couldn’t agree more on your assessment of the fake leaders vs real leaders’ Twitter accounts! I was surprised to see Elizabeth May actually answering people’s policy questions via tweet (a challenge!), but then, she didn’t have a fake leader account to pull the slack for her.
Most remarkably, it seemed to actually be her using the account (not sure how she would have had time for that, if it was in fact her.)
The Orange Room was an interesting concept, particularly their attempts at integrating with external social media (Facebook, blogs, etc.) It’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
You’re right, it’s all got to begin somewhere!
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm
[...] only a few weeks after Steven Harper joined Twitter so did another popular public figure: The ever-legendary Miss Britney [...]