Campaigning in cyberspace

The bookies had Edward Mandla, Liberal candidate for Sydney at 51 to 1. There were those who where questioning why the Liberals were even contesting the seat of Sydney in the recent New South Wales elections. There was talk of a possible upset by the Greens or Labor taking the seat from the Independent candidate - Clover Moore.

No one gave Mandla a chance. Yet he came second on first preferences, forcing Moore to preferences. She eventually won the seat with less than 50 per cent of the vote after all preferences were exhausted*.

Mandla’s strong showing was against opponents with very large budgets and access to greater resources - resources paid for by the taxpayer. His budget was less than $50,000. So how did we compete and, as some say, out campaign? A big part of Mandla’s campaign revolved around a unique online strategy.

When Hilary Clinton announced her run for the US presidency in 2008, she chose not to use traditional channels such as the press release, the TV doorstop interview or talking to a select group of journalists. Instead, she announced her run via her website utilising streaming video technology.

This form of communication will soon become the norm among politicians, as traditional gatekeepers such as journalists will be sidelined in the news breaking cycle. They will be relegated to reporting after the fact instead of before.

The Internet has the advantage that a politician can directly communicate with their constituents. No longer will they have to put up with their message being edited, subedited, selectively quoted or refashioned to suit a particular journalist’s agenda. They will no longer have to put up with their message being misreported. The original message will be in the public domain, any journalist who then tries to spin the message to his or her own ends (and many do) will end up looking pretty stupid.

www.mandlaforsydney was born out of Mandla’s career website www.mandla.com.au. The Mandla website was already established as it contained Mandla’s many ICT articles written for The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and some trade journals. His site was already the top ranked site for a Google search on Edward Mandla.

Initially we were going to run the campaign from the Mandla site but it soon became impractical - there were certain electoral laws that prevented us from doing this (and by the way the electoral laws have yet to really deal with online campaigning). We were able to run ads on YouTube (explained later), which are not covered by the political advertising ban on radio, TV and print, two days before the election. Mandlaforsydney was thus born out of the Mandla website.

At the beginning of March it became apparent that we had a problem. Mandlaforsydney was not getting much traffic but the Mandla website was. The reason for this was that people no longer pay attention to URL’s (uniform resource locator or the “address”) to go to a website. Instead they tend to type in “Edward Mandla” and do a Google search, clicking on the top result. We rectified this by redirecting traffic from Mandla to Mandlaforsydney.

It is therefore important to get your website up early, get it established and work on a “search optimisation strategy”, as most people will try to find information using search engines.

We also registered the .com as well as the .com.au domains. This is an important strategy as your opposition can hijack (cyber squat) your name in cyberspace. For example, the Liberals were able to obtain the domain www.morrisiemma.com and develop the obligatory “smack down” website. What was even better was that www.morrisiemma.com rates higher on the Google search list than the Premier’s own website, www.morrisiemma.com.au. Someone has also registered www.morrisiemma.net, which shows a picture of a derailed train with the message underneath: “pay up if you want this site”!

We made use of YouTube to profile Mandla. The use of YouTube came by accident rather than design. Mandla had a current affairs clip produced, showing him walking the street, meeting the residents and answering questions from a reporter-style interviewer. We wanted to put it up on the website, however, we didn’t have the streaming technology required, so the public would have had to download it (which takes time). Also, the size of the file would have taken us over our space quota incurring more costs.

Enter YouTube. Not only do they store the file but give you code to embed the video into your website. Click on play and it acts just like a video.

From there we thought we could produce our own TV advertisement. On Australia Day, Mandla was doing the rounds on his campaign and many photos were taken. Clover Moore and Morris Iemma were at one of the events that he attended. We managed to get a shot of Moore and Iemma sitting next to each other but looking away from each other. So the Tired, Angry and Won’t Talk ad was born.

I simply used a video editing program (Pinnacle Studio 8) that came with the PC, spliced in the photos and did the commentary over the top. The total cost was our time. We achieved over 600 views for this ad on the site: not bad for a candidate running for office and up there with the views of the TV political ads that were posted during the campaign. Brian Murphy of the Sydney Morning Herald described my voice-over as having the potential to make ears bleed, which is probably a fair assessment!

As far as we know, this is the first time political advertising has been developed solely for the Internet in Australia. Whether this medium will become important is too early to tell, but is unlikely to make a great impact while we have what Fairfax Media Chief David Kirk calls “Fraudband” (but that is another article).

As yet we don’t have the online culture of the Americans. The 2008 Presidential elections will be the first time online campaigning comes to the fore. The Barack Obama Think Different YouTube ad has so far had over three million views (that’s a top rating show in Australia).

With a week to go before the election, we were notified that we had won the best election website awarded by Independent NSW. This award was from a group whose main concern is the role of independent candidates and MP’s. Not bad for a major party.

One of the reasons we won the award was that we supplied polling, how-to-vote and where-to-vote information. I was surprised how few others did this. In the electorate of Sydney, 10,291 or one in five did not vote on the day but voted by other means - pre-poll, postal and absentee votes. Our how-to-vote information was viewed 472 times or by nearly 1 per cent of the electorate. This might not sound like a lot, but it is in a tight contest.

These figures were reflected in other electorates. So with 20 per cent of the electorate voting by other means, parties need to start looking seriously at this group and online is an ideal way to reach them.

We used the open source Mambo content management system for the website. Mambo is fully customisable. I did do some programming modifications but this is not necessary for the average website. One of the benefits of using Mambo is they have a huge development community building all kinds of “add ons” that are easy to implement.

Will, our campaign manager, wanted a count down on the site - 12 days to go to get rid of Labor! Searching through the library of available add ons, I found a fully customisable countdown add on. All it took was five minutes to download, install and customise to achieve what Will wanted.

Having a great website is useless if you are not getting traffic. There are three ways to generate traffic:

• plaster your URL everywhere;
• get your search optimisation strategy right; and/or
• get an article written about you in the paper.

Two incidents came together and generated an enormous amount of traffic to Mandlaforsydney. Malcolm Duncan, an independent candidate for Sydney, was going around with a big pole with a hook on the end pulling other candidates’ posters down. Mandla confronted Malcolm Duncan who was in the process of pulling down one of Mandla’s posters. Malcolm Duncan went to the police claiming assault (later dismissed) and then to a two-hour photo shoot with the Daily Telegraph which reported the incident.

Before this incident, Mandla was donated a full-page advert in the Sydney Star Observer. Already disappointed with the state campaign and its rigidities, Mandla decided to do something completely different. He had a photo done of him in a singlet pumping iron at his local gym, the context being “Edward Mandla fighting fulltime for Sydney”.

When the Telegraph ran the story on the alleged stoush between Mandla and Duncan, they used the “pumping irons” shot and displayed it on the front page. However, many readers thought Mandla was campaigning on health and fitness, not bothering to read the article. A picture is truly worth a thousand words. As more and more media outlets including TV picked up on the story, so did our traffic on the website.

Some articles written about Mandla had the link to the website embedded into the online version. This is pure gold as it makes it easy for people to visit it. The Malcolm Duncan incident also had another favourable outcome. It endeared Mandla to the Greens as Duncan had already pulled down 200 of their posters. Mandla even got Green preferences.

It is still too early to see whether online campaigning will have much of an affect. It will grow in later years with the younger, more tech savvy, generation coming through and with better broadband access. Where it will help is making it easier for the electorate to get to know their candidate. People are more likely to vote for a candidate if they know something about them. Door knocking is time intensive and it is almost impossible to meet all 50,000 electors. By utilising a website to speak directly to constituents, candidates can begin to build a profile.

* Clover Moore received 20,364 first and second preference votes from a total of 42,094 cast or 48.4 per cent. However there were 50,053 enrolled voters so her real percentage of the electorate is 40.7 per cent. That means six out of ten electors did not vote for her in the first or second instance. These figures are common across many seats and indicate that if the electorate were to rise up and unite sitting candidates could be in real trouble. Source: Electoral Commission NSW.