YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, flickr, blogs… The social media tools are available for all. It’s just a question of rolling up the sleeves and getting the hands dirty. But how many MEPs will actually make a video or send tweets to their constituents? Which Dutch candidate will text her supporters?
Marcel Reichart, one of the organizers of the annual DLD conference in Munich, has looked at the impact of social media on European election campaign politics, specifically German election politics, and he concludes that there’s still a long way to go. Too much top-down thinking still going on when it comes to election media strategies, he says.
Reichart’s starting point is the Obama campaign that encouraged millions of Americans to get involved in politics, and he quotes a 1 November 2008 PEW Research report in which nearly a quarter of Americans said that they received regular information about the presidential campaign via the web.
The 48-slide presentation, complete with embedded media, is available here on SlideRocket. At slide 30, the presentation moves from the Obama campaign to German politics and the penultimate slide (No. 47) asks: “How can Obama’s success be replicated in Germany?” It answers: “Real change comes from the bottom up”. Reichart’s study also recommends the “creative embedding of social media tools in the overall strategy”, and includes the sensible recommendation: “Build things where people are, not where you want them to be“. Over to you, campaign managers and political media strategists.
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Thanks for sharing that slideshow, it is VERY interesting, especially for me, as a German. 53% inactives (compared with 25% in the US). Would be interesting to have data from other European countries - or are we just blogging in the void?