Electronic Campaigning – Avishkar’s Opinion
About 6 years ago, I got really paranoid about the probability of a global paper shortage. As someone who at the time produced lots of pamphlets and posters - it was literally the worst thing I could imagine.
Added to this the vast cost of printing and publishing just the basic documents needed to keep our organisations alive legally; and it became clear to me that the political world (we who generate large volumes of really verbose documents) needed to make the transition to paperless operations. This was not a groundbreaking decision at the time - in fact the call for paperless politics goes back to the early 1980's.
In terms of campaigning though, the transition to paperless propaganda presents the most obvious problem of needing to ensure that your target market has access to the internet (ie. web / email) or text & picture based telecoms (ie. sms / mms) and also the ancillary problem of ensuring that the person targeted actually reads and understands the communication (which you have spent hours designing – fitting your manifesto into a 160 character SMS is not all that easy).
This is all before considering whether the electronic communiqué will be effective or even “on-message”.
All through the intervening period, the advent of web based advertising agencies; indicated that banners and pop-ups might be effective at grabbing the attention of web and email users.
However as every web-user knows such things are intrusive and most of us block these pop-ups outright.
Couple with this the IMMUTABLE FACT that nobody reads emails thoroughly – certainly not the epistles that I churn out – and the problems of effective paperless propaganda grow that much greater.
Strong, innovative, engaging web content hosted on your website will certainly be effective and efficient. However getting people to know about, find, use and regularly visit your website is not that easy – even with highly specialised search engines.
The evidence of the last 10 years suggests that all websites that are very busy and heavily used are all marketed on other platforms e.g. TV, Radio, Billboards, Cellphones, Posters&Pamphlets etc. although these however are the very platforms from which we are trying to switch away, and so the use of them while justifying the end outcome does not justify the means.
Therefore it seems quite clear that while the cost effectiveness of the e-coms may make our auditors quite happy; the inefficiencies of propaganda delivery will make our secretary-generals quite unhappy.
And then lo-and-behold the entry of person to person networking. Connect-U and others who have aped their technology (even their code) like Facebook, and other “blog variants” like myspace.com provide two things that other forms of e-coms do not.
Firstly they provide a direct connection to the voter and secondly they provide you with all sorts of useful information for profiling voters in terms of their propensity to vote for your party.
While some will argue that the use of this information is a violation of the voters’ rights to privacy – the fact is that it is perfectly possible to for instance identify every single LIBERAL, VERY LIBERAL and LIBERTARIAN on Facebook, in your national/regional/local/university/workplace network.
So hypothetically if the Young Liberals of Southern Africa had an “operative” who worked at “Company XYZ” and they were part of the “Company XYZ Network” then they would be able to determine who the Liberals at “Company XYZ” were.
Now while this would be completely unethical if such “voter mining” took place during office hours and interfered with their productive output – the fact is that it would provide every young liberal professional a guide as to who were the people in their company who had similar outlooks on life (political orientation).
Walking into a committee or team meeting to present a new project idea – it would be useful – if u knew right away how many conservatives and how many liberals were in the room at the table. This would remove the risk of pitching an open minded idea to close minded people or vice versa.
However while this would help the young liberal professional in their progress up the corporate ladder – because they would always know how to “sell their” ideas – or at least how to couch the language of their sales pitches – it would also allow for the rapid “organisation” of labour in their workplace – because they (the young liberals) would know who are the people who are likely to feel the same way about stuff that happens.
From this simple example it is clear that political activists in the corporate environment stand to benefit greatly from utilising tools such as Facebook or Connect U.
These benefits, over and above the obvious networking benefits provided by such P2P platforms might create an incentive for people who have structured, free access to the internet to actually use these services regularly – but this is compromised by the fact that every time you submit information to Facebook – Facebook pings your computer, and from what I can see off my firewall, they may do more than this as well.
Apart from the utilisation of your personal information, which may be being analysed for commercial purposes; there is also the consideration that by placing tracking “cookies” and the like on your pc’s that all semblance of internet security goes out the window. As a result of these intrusions, a large number of corporates, particularly financial services companies (whose employees sit in front of their PCs all day and are therefore prime candidates for e-recruitment) block access to sites like Facebook altogether.
So it remains that universities may be the only other places where people have free or relatively cheap internet usage – although for the same reasons of firewalls and security a large number of universities are shutting out Facebook on the basis that its not academic work and therefore it compromises the students learning program.
In order to maximise the value of such tools – which allow you to:-
1. Meet, Greet and Bleat with Voters
2. Suggest to, Illustrate to and Educate Voters as to the value of your policies
3. Engage with, Learn from and Convince Voters as to of the value of your policies
4. Propagate, Demonstrate, Advertise and otherwise Meaningfully Communicate to and with Voters as to the value of your policies
5. Recruit, Train, Mentor and Deploy Voters as Value Ambassadors for your policies
6. Manage the Activities of these Value Ambassadors in their repetition of the above cycle for the growth of the support base for your policies.
We need to first ensure that a sufficiently large number of activists have their own access to such services, and then to ensure that a sufficiently large number of general users are using these services so that they can be recruited.
But this is not enough – simply because of the motivation of why people use these services. By and large very few people use facebook to “find the political salvation” or to go shopping for a political party.
Largely the playground of people looking to connect with people who they haven’t seen in a long time (old friends) or to meet people who hold the allure of exciting new friendships – services like Facebook serve more to prove Maslow’s hierarchy rather than to serve as a development tank, with prospective voters, who are ready and waiting to be converted.
And so in response to the question about the online gaming environment…
Yes, if IFLRY develops an online game that it owns and places this game within an environment that it controls, and by extension is able to control all of the advertising on that website – then sure; the communication of the periphery (banner ads on the sidelines of the webpage) of the gamers’ field of view – might be embedded and lead to long term voter recruitment.
And Yes, if the game that IFLRY develops deals with democracy, human rights, rule of law, opportunity based market economy and a tolerant, open and participative society – then sure; the embedding of the “liberal message” will yield results in the short to medium term.
As an example, the dialogue on tolerance, racism and xenophobia in Harry Potter which was contextualised as “Pure Bloods vs. Mudbloods” may be less than 10 years old – but it has guaranteed that there is a generation of kids who will instinctively now be able to engage with this issue and propose the liberal position in this debate.
However – since these indirect P2P services focus on some form of interactive gratification and hold ancillary P2P potential only in order to connect users so that they might discuss their usage patterns or strategies, then trying to “break into” this channel of P2P communication is unlikely to be successful.
That is to say that if you were selling “tool upgrades” (weapons for a war-game, cars for a racing game etc.) then you would be able to “capture” the users attention between sessions of play. However trying to “sell” these gamers “liberal policies” between sessions of “Unreal Tournament” is just daft.
This applies to all online activity sites – whether its an electronic rose garden simulation or an online game or a streaming webcast of a football match – the fact is that politics is less than 5 minutes of a layperson’s (a layperson = a non politico) life each day – and in that 5 minutes they generally have some very, very, very nasty things to say about the government and politicians in general.
So without dissuading our activists from trying to recruit voters in these environments, lets just say that by being just one of many traders trying to sell the users something unrelated to their usage experience – we are more as likely to be ignored or forgotten – than as likely to be remembered and supported.
By controlling the whole of the activity site – there is a greater chance that we will be able to subliminally program the users – but this is ridiculously expensive and would require the financial contribution, human resources and participation support of every IFLRY MO to make it feasible. And this actually assumes that the online activity we’re punting is unique and self attractive to users.
So in conclusion, the arena of MASS AUDIENCE electronic communication can be summarised as:-
Electronic Platform | Efficiency Strengths | Efficiency Weaknesses | Comparative Costs | Recruitment Effectiveness |
| | | | |
Television | 1 to Many | Production Requirements | High | High – if well produced |
Radio | 1 to Many | Production Requirements | Medium | High – if well produced |
Phone S/MMS | In hand and always “online” | Assembling Mailing List | Medium | Medium – tends to be ignored |
General Website | Permanent Display of Manifesto | Marketing of website | Low | Medium – tends to get lost in |
E-Mail | 1 to Many | Words don’t get read | Low | Low – tends to get ignored |
Web Networking Site eg Facebook | Direct Communication | Limitations on Recruiting Strangers | Low | Low – Core focus clouds out msg |
Web Activity Site eg SL | Large Numbers of Users | Only Medium to Long Term Conversions | Low | Low – Core activity clouds out msg |
| | | | |
AS COMPARED TO |
| | | | |
In Person Localised Branch Level P2P In-Person Dialogue | Full Explanation and Conversion | Requires Dedicated 1:1 Recruiters | Medium | High |
The above is just my opinion and I do not assert that it is the outcome of any research exercise or process – although it has been my experience as a political activist that the above is true, at least for the South African market.
I hope that this is of some help in our quest to reach out to young liberals who aren’t as yet members and activists of liberal youth movements. Avishkar Govender (YLSA)
Avishkar Govender
eThekwini-Durban
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
SADC - AU