We are far away from an internet campaign for the European Elections like the Obama initiated for the American elections. The public affairs consulting company Fleishman-Hillard published a study about the internet use of MEPs. It said that
75 percent of MEPs try to contact their voters by their website, and only 51 percent read blogs weakly or more often.
“The vast majority of MEPs are using the Internet and are certainly being inspired by the success that Barack Obama has had, but too many of them still believe that digital tools are less effective than traditional forms of communication, such as television and newspapers,” pointed James Stevens, the senior vice-president for digital services at Fleishman-Hillard in Brussels, out. However, he thinks that the MEPs will catch up soon. Many MEPs plan to make use of Blogs in the future in order to get into contact and inform their voters. The Party of European Socialists (PES) is already pretty involved in internet campaign with Twitter & Co. As well as some MEPs of other Party Groups. One of them is Christofer Fjellner, who said he already campaigns online and encourages his colleagues to do so too.
That online campaigning is more important than ever shows the fact that more than 60 percent of the internet users in the EU read regulalry blogs. Especially young people can be reached best in the internet via facebook, studivz & Co. Angela Merkel has already picked up that trend and has now a profile in Studivz (German complement of facebook), of which everyone can become a fan. And to get into contact with her young voters, she even wrote a message to all her fans last week, in which she thanked them and gave advise where you can involve yourself in campaigns if you want to. Quite a little bit like Barack Obama. However, I think that would be a nice way for German MEPs as well, but until know I was not able to find a profile of Silvia Koch Mehrin, Elmar Brok or Rebecca Harms in Studivz.
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I was just reading it today as well. Shocking, but at the same time - didn’t we already know before that in USA elections they were paying much more attention to social networking sites than here in Europe?
I sometimes write to MEP candidates on Twitter… and they do write back!
P.S. If I could offer one piece of criticism: it is that you didn’t link to the Fleishman-Hillard study. It would be really nice to be able to click from your blog straight into a PDF!
Thanks for the mention of our study. We’re glad you found it interesting.
It’s interesting what you say about German politicians. When we set out on the research, we wanted to have enough of a sample to contrast and compare different nationalities. (You can still do so yourself using the dataset we make available in the downloads section).
Alas, it was an effort to get the MEPs to reply to give us sufficient data to do so. This was particularly the case with Germans, who clearly have an aversion to surveys - despite some excellent support from Alex Alvaro MEP (ALDE). If you want to see an MEP who is riding the crest of the digital wave check his website out.
For completeness (thanks Josef) here’s the URL of the study.
http://www.epdigitaltrends.eu