Ever since Barack Obama’s election as the U.S. president, countless of PR practitioners, image handlers as well as political parties and their media departments have jumped into the social media bandwagon, hoping to duplicate U.S. Democratic party’s brilliant use of the internet to power an election campaign.
No doubt about it, social media tools present immense potential to any political party looking to grow their base and eventually secure power. President Obama’s ability to muster 13 Million supporters to get people to vote and raise funds via Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media channels have been a subject of dozens of case studies including applying election social media strategies for businesses.
However, here's the million dollar (probably billions if we talk about elections worldwide) question: can the Obama social media campaign success be duplicated in other countries like Australia in particular?
We cannot exactly answer that question until further studies on social media use by other democracies around the world but we can certainly start by looking at the environment where social media tools will be used to further a political agenda.
Here's some issues that I think that should be considered on the use of social media for political campaigns:
1. Form Of Government
2. The Candidate And Timing
3. The Target Audience Or Constituency
4. The Message
Due to time constraints, I will tackle the issue on Form of Government on this post.
The Obama campaign was unique in the sense it was planned and fine-tuned to fit not just the US political landscape but also to blend perfectly with the American presidential form of government and its federal system as well as its traditions.
While the U.S. president is technically not elected directly by popular vote (it’s the Electoral College who does), engaging individual voters through social media networks makes absolute sense because most of the time the Electors (members of the Electoral College) promise to vote for a candidate who gets the most popular vote in a state although legally Electors can also switch sides at the last minute but rarely does so.
In this case, courting popular votes directly through old and new media (internet) is not only logical, it’s a requirement.
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| Image Source: http://sbsmain.sbs.com.au/news/yoursayarticle/1310262/Who-performed-better-in-the-leader-s-debate |
In the case of Australia, which practices the parliamentary form of government and where the Prime Minister is elected by the majority party, a PM contender only needs to court direct voters from his or her own locality to win a seat in Parliament.
After getting that seat, it’s practically all in-house & in-party wheeling-dealing to get the nod of the party leaders and the other MPs. So you can see, there may be need to go on an all out national campaign and organizing as in the case of Obama just to get the votes or win a territory if the objective is to use social networking sites and other channels to win votes.
What a PM wanna-be may consider doing however, is to still campaign on a national scale to promote his or her party mates or allies in a particular district or locality and help that candidate win a seat in parliament which is not easy as it sounds.
Another important use for social media even if there’s no need to campaign for direct votes is to get people to talk about the party’s stand on issues and other items on the agenda. Getting popular support or at least testing public opinion for a proposal is an age-old practice since the time of ancient Rome.
Using Twitter or Facebook to start discussions is a less costly (politically and financially) way of measuring public reaction.
To summarize, the real issue as far as the form of government is this: all politics is local and the Obama strategy has shown that while global tools are readily available, it has to be configured to suit the local environment instead of just going pro form or copy and pasting it to a campaign.
I will be posting an extended discussion on the other 3 points in a later post but since this blog is about tech and cash (not politics), how do we correlate to making money online?
Well, if you take a look at the 4 factors listed, you can easily replace it with the following:
From Form Of Government to Market Place Environment
From Candidate And Timing to Your Product / Service Offered & When To Offer It
From Target Audience & Constituency to Your Market & Prospects
From Message to Content
Clearly, business can learn a lot from political campaigns and not just the other way around.
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