New Media Propels Australian Left

by Patrick Ruffini :: December 5th, 2007 11:08 pm

I have argued in the past that if Republicans don’t fully embrace new media, we may well find ourselves on the losing side of another close election, wondering what could have happened if only we had used all the tools available to us.

While I believe we have made real progress these last few months, this scenario is no longer a scare tactic or a pipedream. We need only look at Australia, where Prime Minister John Howard’s party clung to old tactics and were decisively defeated by Kevin Rudd’s Labor:

Labor deployed blogs, used behavioural targeting on the internet, ads on mobile phones and a raft of ambient (or alternative) media such as stickers and T-shirts to get its message across to voters in marginal seats.

Over the campaign, the Kevin07 website attracted 418,000 unique visitors, while the Liberal party managed to get perhaps 40 per cent of that figure, according to figures from Simon White, partner of media buying agency, Ikon Communications. …

More than 2 million pages were viewed during that period and 1.5 million videos downloaded from websites such as YouTube, Kevin07, MySpace and Ninemsn. Nearly 90,000 flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers and badges were sold or given away.

Rudd’s profile on MySpace attracted 25,000 friends to the Liberal Party’s eight. “We made it clear pretty early on that they [the ALP] were going to have to embrace the new media and understand that the consumer generates a lot of the media nowadays,” said Mr White.

This is the part that I believe is key:

[P]arty sources have indicated the campaign team was out of touch with new media and thought they could reprise the strategy from previous campaigns. The source said most digital initiatives came from the prime minister’s office and not the campaign office. Mr White said Labor’s activity had a cumulative effect.

At a panel last night, I made the point that seldom if ever in a campaign can one answer the question “How does it win us votes?” about any given endorsement or campaign maneuver. Campaigns are about intangibles and cumulative effects. Your job as a campaign staffer is not to jawbone for votes one by one. It’s to create an environment for momentum shifts that can move thousands of votes in one sitting.

The same goes for online strategies. Would Howard have won if his party had embraced the Web? Probably not. He was well behind in the polls throughout the campaign. But the ALP’s indifference to new media was just one symptom of a deeper disease. They thought they could just rerun the same old playbook in a dramatically different environment. They were as inefficient in allocating old media dollars as they were negligent in embracing new media. Labor innovated and the ALP stagnated, and not just in new media, though new media was a leading indicator.

Early on in the 2006 cycle, I and some others had a little new media “come to Jesus” session with a staffer for a vulnerable GOP incumbent. The staffer seemed somewhat bewildered and defensive when it came to this whole blogosphere thing, and finally confessed that when it came to the medium, “We are afraid.”

Her boss, an amiable, fairly popular incumbent, went down to defeat by double digits.

25,000 MySpace friends may not seem like a big deal in a country of 18 million people, but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Good online buzz is indistinguishable from offline buzz. If your candidate has more Google searches and more MySpace friends, there’s a good chance their dominating mindshare offline too. Online buzz also feeds into an overall momentum narrative. The buzz for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul has had a self-reinforcing effect on their respective bases, strengthening them both online and on the ground.

Australia shows how campaigns that don’t innovate online won’t innovate offline either. They’re lumbering and complacent, thinking they can get along with what’s always worked. I have seen how breakthrough strategies and insights from one election cycle can become crippling the next because the apparatus thinks that it’s found the One True Way to win and won’t consider alternatives.

Online strategists are programmed to resist that kind of mindset. People online are constantly jumping from medium to medium, innovating every step of the way. In my own time online, I’ve seen the ‘net and politics online evolve from Compuserve to Gopher sites to Usenet to eGroups to PoliticsUSA.com to Drudge to the legendary pop-up windows of the McCain 2000 site to vote-swapping to blogs to “the party in a laptop” to YouTube to Facebook. Just reciting that list brings back wistful nostalgia of ye olde times, because on the Internet, you tend to do very little looking back.

Tagged: australia john howard kevin rudd online politics

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