gatewatching

Eagle-eared listeners of 2SER FM may have noticed me popping up on the radio the other day - Leeanne Torpey interviewed me for a segment on The Fourth Estate about the use of social networking in politics (following on from the successful use of social networking in galvanising support for Barack Obama and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kevin Rudd). It’s come out quite well, and you can now access a podcast of the whole 30-minute show at the 2SER Website.

The key point I ended up on, and one very much worth exploring further, is what to do with a network like Obama’s now that the election is over. (Labor’s campaign managers have just answered [?] this by rebranding Kevin07 as KevinPM - we’ll see how that works out.) For the Obama machine, this will be interesting to follow - after all, what exactly is his my.barackobama.com network? Is it part of the Democrat campaigning system, part of Democrat party structures, or even an element of the incoming administration? Is it a quasi-party in its own right, a political movement, a non-profit lobby group, or even a commercial enterprise (it is a dot.com, after all)?

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USA, social networking activism, Barack Obama, elections, Kevin Rudd, social networking, USA

Opinion piece in the ABC’s Opinion section here.

With the US election likely to be decided today, it’s a good time to have a look at the way social media’s been used in this campaign. From the massive fundraising of Obama’s microdonors, to the fact checking of candidates, to the raving lunacy of the wingnut fringe, this election has really brought social media’s promises and pitfalls to the fore.

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is, barring a sudden upset, Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.

Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation - PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

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Uncategorized abc, Barack Obama, democracy, e-democracy, election, McCain, Obama, politics, psephology, QUT, social media, social networking, USA

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party’s digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - “Australia’s first digital election”, as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.

Kevin07 had some 2 million page views and some 400,000 unique visitors, and 14,000 “have your say” forms and 18,000 petitions were submitted. User-generated content was key here; most of the content of the on-site blog was drawn from user submissions. The videos had some 1.8 million views (and were cheap and effective); MySpace and Facebook had 24,000 and 20,000 friends and fans, respectively; the mobile Kevin07 site had 34,000 unique visitors; 40,000 T-shirts were sold; 1.2 million people were reached in marginal seats; and there were lots of “emails to Kevin”. What was important here was to reward supporters and maximise viral impact (one-click canvassing), and to engage swinging voters - this latter, indeed, was especially crucial in this election, of course.

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social networking academic, conferences, elections, Kevin Rudd, social networking

The announcement of the Greensblog is an interesting example for the possibilities of blogging for minority political parties. Clearly drawing inspiration from Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog , it shows the value of the blogging format for discussing political positions that fall outside the easy left-right, Labor-Liberal soundbite-based journalism often found in the industrial mainstream. As Greensblog contributor Tim Hollo hopes, it will work for the Greens because their policies aren’t necessarily “soundbite-friendly”, and they welcome the possibility of consultative policy development.

This form of engagement is something the major parties should be watching. For some years now, observers have noted a trend of voters moving away from traditional party affiliations to multi-faceted political perspectives, shifting from party-political to social activism, and forming fluid allegiances that vary across policy areas.

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blogging, government, social networking academic, blogging, e-democracy, government, social networking, wiki

So, I’ve been kicking around on Facebook lately. My colleagues have posted some interesting analysis of Facebook, which I am still thinking about. I like Facebook, in a way that I never got into Myspace. I’ve caught up with friends from highschool who I haven’t seen for years, even played scrabble with them, but there’s still that concern about privacy.

Anyways… This struck me the other day. I live on the Northside of Brisbane, so I was unsurprised when I got an invite to a Northside related Facebook group. Read more…

citizen journalism, social networking academic, citizen journalism, facebook, social bookmarking, social networking