3 Predictions about Social Media and Politics in Australia

January 22, 2011 in Thoughts
Tags: accountability, Australia, Internet, political technology, politics, predictions, social media, technology, transparency, voters

Social media is the new political battle ground.  We saw it during the federal election and the Victorian state election. Political parties around the world have quickly jumped on the band-wagon, especially after Obama’s overwhelming success in using it for his election campaign.

However with its meteoric growth in use and adoption by political parties and activists, what can be expected?

I was inspired to write this piece after reading “4 Predictions for Politics and Social Media”. Coming from the perspective of US citizen it didn’t read to me as to have too much resonance with an Australian audience. True a couple of them will be the case here in Australia, but for now there is a still a great deal of immaturity surrounding online campaigning; and its integration with mainstream political and community campaigns.

Having thought about the article and the situation here in Australia, I decided to write my own predictions for politics and social media, as it relates to the  Australian experience. (Well my experience as an Australian for what it’s worth.)

These aren’t in any particular order of importance or merit, by the way.

1 Social media will be more integrated into regular campaign activities.

There’s no doubt that one of the biggest problems with many online campaigns is there disconnectedness from the rest of the campaign. For some the reality is dawning that the data that can be derived from online sources can be insightful for other elements of a campaign; and even support other elements of a campaign.

And campaigns will start seeing how the online and on-the-ground elements converge; and how to leverage these for more meaningful engagement. Candidates and campaigns will learn to engage meaningfully with constituents and possible voters.

2 Political parties will seek to establish their own digital communities.

The political parties have lots and lots of members and supports online. They will seek to harness these members, supporters and activists to help spread their messages, through digital communities.  The power of recommendations is important to the political game; and developing these digital communities could be important to getting the much coveted recommendations.

This is already in some respects starting to happen, albeit in less-than-sophisticated way.  But the signs are good that political parties will catch on to this concept and quickly learn how to harness the power of their communities of supporters, volunteers and activists.

3 Blogs will start having a greater influence on political discourse.

Blogs will also start to become the preferred sources of more and more people seeking information, details or commentary about politics, the political parties and their policies and ideology.  One only has to look at how blogs are shaping the political discourse in the USA, Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East and Asian to see that Australia will soon follow suit.

Australians are very high consumers of social media and blogs are becoming more and more of interest to Internet users. The last Australian statistics showed that approximately a quarter of Internet users read a blog with about an eighth of Internet users running a blog.  On the face it, it sounds like good numbers already.  However it is more likely that these numbers don’t reflect the actual frequency of reading blogs or how many of those running a blog have more than one blog.

The last federal election saw an explosion in websites and blogs around politics and the election itself.  There was also an increase in the number of people reading different blogs and looking for alternative sources of information over traditional mainstream media.  I don’t have any numbers to support this claim but as an extremely active political blogger, I certainly got the sense of that when compared to the election in 2007.

A last word

I expect to see that more and more online options being used by political parties, third party campaigns and non-government organisations, including community and grassroots organisations. The political parties will begin to seek to establish their own online communities which will help spread their messages and counter negative commentary. The Labor Party has been the first to take this on, and the Liberals are attempting it as well. However, whether my prediction about it is long term enough is the question. We’ll know by the next election if the prediction holds true; in my humble opinion.

Please feel free to add your predictions about social media and politics in Australia.

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