Thoughts on 2010 election online battle ground

October 22, 2010 in Campaigns, Federal Election, Thoughts
Tags: accountability, ALP, Australia, Australian Greens, ballot box, democracy, FaceBook, federal government, GetUp, Internet, Labor Party, Liberals, online activism, personal opinion, political activism, political parties, politics, social networking, Twitter, voters, voting, Your Rights at Work, YouTube

NOTE: This post was first published on theangle.org, titled “2010 Federal Election: A Look Back at the Online Battle Ground“

 

As the minority Labor government settles in and things are relatively back to normal, I think it’s a good time to look back at the effectiveness of the online battles fought during the federal election.

There’s already been some commentary about this since the poll on August 21 and there was much discussion about the battle online during the election campaign.  I’ve agreed with much of what has been said already about the  poorly-delivered messages, lack of depth in policies and political advertisements.  However, I’ve found much commentary about the online “campaigns” often lacks a general understanding of political organising and campaigning.

In my opinion there were no real stand out online campaigns offered by the political parties though the Australian Greens were the best of the major parties. Among the political lobby groups, the “WorkChoices. Never Again” group offered the best online campaign linking as it did with a coordinated on-the-ground movement.

Note: I’m not ignoring the stand out individuals but rather looking at it broadly. There were some excellent individual efforts but these have been discussed by others.

Sites, Social Media and Engagement

All of the political parties launched new websites for the election campaign with varying degrees of success. It was certainly interesting to see the ALP launch a website encouraging people to join it – party membership not required – and “participate” in policy groups and campaign discussions.  The Liberals also made an effort to encourage online participation, but unfortunately delivered the least engaging website.

It lacked any kind of engagement with their “community” and it seems as though moderators have not been appointed.  Labor was also guilty of this but has a higher level of quality engagement with some moderator intervention and interaction. The Australian Greens website was, by comparison, more basic in that they didn’t offer banners/badges or space for supporters to engage with the party. However it delivered on their blogs and the party definitely delivered through with their use of social media.

Of the political lobby groups running campaigns, Greenpeace; the ACTU’s  ”WorkChoices. Never Again” campaign; GetUp and the Fair Go For Billionaires campaign were stand outs.  The GetUp campaign was effective in producing a great deal of white noise.  Undoubtedly the single greatest contribution GetUp made was the challenge to the enrolment laws, which saw an additional 100,000 people added to the electoral roll.

The Fair Go For Billionaires was fun and very well supported on social networking sites. Through using highly satirical clips for YouTube, the campaign delivered their message ensuring broad range support.  The clips were absolutely brilliant and very cleverly written.  It had very high production values with professionals obviously at the helm; a full creative and development process. Although the campaign wasn’t overly interactive with supporters it was a fun campaign revealing a more serious message about the mining industries scare campaign over the mining resources rent tax.

The ACTU’s “WorkChoices. Never Again” campaign, while not as flashy as perhaps GetUp’s or the Fair Go For Billionaires campaign, was well supported with the Your Rights at Work campaign site. It offered supporters ways to interact with the campaign through groups and electorate specific landing pages.  It was also quite active in using social media to distribute information, materials and ‘stories’ about the off-the-ground campaign. It was the only online campaign encouraging supporters and activists to undertake activities and attend activities in real life.  It didn’t fully take advantage of the groups and could have spent more time “speaking” with the community.

The unions’ campaigns were certainly better supported and able to mobilise people on-the-ground using its online campaign to support such effort. It was the Your Rights at Work campaign and GetUp that offered the most interactive and engaging online campaign.  Yet full kudos go to the Your Rights at Work campaign for better integrating it’s on-the-ground and online campaigns.

Unfortunately most MPs and candidates using social networking sites simply posted their media releases or latest pictures or YouTube clips with little engagement with supporters or followers. It was essentially just post and hope.  With the partisan battleground on Twitter, these were relentlessly retweeted by the true believers of respective political parties.  It was truly amazing to see in some cases, people using their business Twitter accounts.  There was a great deal of fear in having to articulate anything other than glib slogans.

When it came to using things like YouTube, it was another disappointment.  The last election saw political parties upload their TV ads and “interviews with candidates” and other such guff. And alas we suffered much the same this election.  Comments were either disabled or poorly moderated with little interaction with supporters and (sensible) detractors from the campaigns operating the accounts. The Greens were the most open to comments and did interact with people that made comments. GetUp and Your Rights at Work also offered the most open offerings on YouTube and engaged with people that left comments.  There was no real innovative contributions with most of them being just the television commercials; candidate and campaign videos.  Although the ‘WorkChoices. Never Again’ campaign offered up “Walk a Day in My Shoes” videos which had candidates spend time with workers seeing what they do and how important unions are to workers. Other unions did this too; it’s something that the Bligh government has hi-jacked.

There was the usual fan fare with Twibbons, banners, and badges for blogs, Twitter and Facebook. However, this was entirely predictable but added some colour and flare.  I’m not entirely sure how or if this kind of thing made a difference to people’s voting intentions. Although it was fun observing who was openly supporting which party; other than the partisan hacks, of course.

On the whole the Liberals were the least engaging and ignored any efforts to engage. It’s hardly surprising when the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, stopped updating his Twitter account not long after the election was announced. It was only during the election campaign that most Liberal candidates and Members of Parliament started using social media.  Between the partisan tit-for-tats and the influx of new accounts, cynicism about the election campaign increased among long-time users and lurkers.

Contrast all of this against what was offered by a significant number of independent websites dedicated to all kinds of different aspects of the election campaign.  These sites were sponsored by media companies and think tanks. A large number of them were completely independent and non-partisan. There were great sites for monitoring the media, what election issues were trending on social networking sites, the different influencers on Twitter, news aggregators, election-dedicated forums and blogs, and a site for uploading election leaflets.  These contributions were by far much more effective than what was offered by the political parties.

When it came to utilising the social tools of the Internet it seemed to me that there was little sophistication in the campaigns offered by the political parties.  As mentioned earlier, I believe the Greens best utilised social networking sites to engage with supporters and members online. There were faults, true – they didn’t push enough on encouraging volunteers for off-line activity and at times fell for the ease of the echo-chamber.

Summing Up

The websites offered by the political parties were by-and-large un-exciting but it was good to see efforts to be more open with community-based websites.

In general the social networking sites ended up being partisan battlegrounds.  Twitter was particularly bad, with a huge increase in new accounts that seemingly had the sole purpose of talking up their side and sledging the other side (and their supporters).  This phenomenon didn’t really happen so much on Facebook although there were instances of ‘un-friending’ and tensions within families and IRL social networks.

The election was much more fun in places like forums and Facebook, while by-and-large the political parties didn’t get it.