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RSS 2.0

The battle for the e-hearts and minds of voters

By Stephen Dann - posted Friday, 8 September 2006


The technology: noticeable by absence

The two big parties in the Queensland election have embraced Web 1.0 in a bearhug, and they're not letting go without a fight. Neither site used anything that could be possibly related to the Web 2.0 platform format. If anything, tags would come into their own in directing the visitor to key content, policy and press releases. Sure, tag clouds are going to be the blink tag of Web 2.0 when Web 3.0 rolls in but, for now, what better way to show what's important in this election than a series of appropriately tagged policy and press release statements?

Blogging is noticeable absent from the two areas and justifiably so. Campaign blogging would provide little content that's useful to the parties. And if the comments are left open it could create a localised breeding ground for fights between impassioned supporters from both sides, plus ads for casinos and poker.

That said both sites have a stream of press releases flowing from their site. Why not just use a Typepad or Blogger infrastructure to manage the process? Calendars, tags and headlines with abstracts would certainly clean up the current press release process. Of course, this does assume that the press releases section was really meant for the public rather than as an online backup for the media to pick up a lost fax.

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Political marketing and the Web 2.0

Political marketing on the Internet in this campaign is one-way traffic. Context is given to you and for these offerings the webpundit is grateful. Politics is an area where very passionate people can and will do a lot to make life difficult for their opponents and to be blunt the Web 2.0 infrastructure just makes life easier for those planning on causing grief for a political party.

Imagine for a moment a political party Web 2.0 website with RSS feeds, candidate blogs, issue wikis for policy, and creative common remix licensed videos and podcasts for download. How long would it last before spammers destroyed the blog's comment capacity? You'd have to run sweeps on how quickly a podcast of political promises was remixed and reloaded to the wiki as "official" content. Even the wiki would be a constant battleground between the campaign owners and the volunteer corps trying to put "the truth" about each policy into the site.

Even something as basic as providing an RSS feed for policy and press release is not necessarily a good political platform. Your feed will be automatically added by your opponents, and they will be able to go straight to work on picking apart your policy the moment the feed delivers it right to their inbox. Without the feed you rely on your opponent having to dig through your site to find the content they want to use against you.

In the same way, campaign blogging looks great on paper as a way to let individual candidates have a voice for their local area but in political reality it's a nightmare where someone will contradict their leader's party line, if not in the post then definitely in the comments section. Similar nightmares of online interaction will occur when candidates try MySpace, Livejournal or Vox and learn quickly that what they write in the informal voice of comments or posts will swiftly overpower the official policy documents.

Brandwise, the TeamBeattie political marketing juggernaut attributes every PDF file, policy statement and press release to Premier Beattie. If they go to the multi-candidate blog, vox and Myspace they'd have to end every post with "This is the word of Team Beattie (Thanks be to Peter)". Having a single site with a single voice is a political marketing strategy that is more valuable than multiple voices even when those voices are in unison.

In review

These sites are from your parents' dotcom era. There are no revolutionary new media techniques, no adoption of the cutting edge, and that's probably for the best. Political campaigning as we currently recognise it is incompatible with the open platform "spaces people use" approach of Web 2.0, and far more at home in the Web 1.0 "place you go" style. If you were looking for a revolution in Internet politics at the state level, you'll have to wait for the next election. Or run for parliament with your own website.

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About the Author

Dr Stephen Dann is a Senior Lecturer and Masters of Marketing Convenor from School of Management, Marketing and International Business at The Australia National University.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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