Attracting young voters? Social media fail

In the last year, before the beginning of the official campaign, parties from across the political spectrum have been attempting to tap into the youth voter demographic, primarily through social media. It must be said that I say ‘primarily’ because this youth voter has not seen anything outside social media, and if it exists, I haven’t seen it (which given I go searching for this stuff, means it’s been a failure). Some parties are just throwing things in a social media-ish direction and hoping something will stick.

Some parties have had more success than others.

Whoops, wrong National Party

The Nationals commissioned a series of youtube videos that can only be described as quaint – a montage of ‘Aussie Battlers’ accompanied by a bland, John Williamson-esque jingle about Australia and the majority and … *snoooze*. While it was uninspired (and not terribly inspiring), it seemed to have decent production values. It wasn’t a screaming clearance warehouse sale advert with flashing neon colours (although that could be a moderately entertaining new approach). But it was pitched firmly at country voters, with an almost half-hearted plea to city-folk tossed in for good measure. It appeared to be the Nationals bailing furiously to maintain their vote, to secure the heartland. But it was on youtube. One half of the Coalition that pledged to bring a rollout of usable internet to regional Australia to a grinding halt, was advertising to regional voters on the internet.

Their Facebook page has fewer fans than many people have friends. It was also too difficult to find, only showing up after an Australian National Party page with Chuck Norris as the profile picture.

It's funny cos it rhymes

Of the two major parties, the Liberals have a greater following on Facebook, and indeed have more ready access to social media links on their website – right at the top, versus Labor’s buried at the bottom of the page. However their approach to Youtube is a very simplistic one: simply uploading traditional political advertising that, regardless of whether it actually makes it to TV screens, is still a TV ad. They are droning, and crammed with information overload, while at the same time saying not very much at all. One arguable exception is the “Kevin o-Lemon” spot, which at least showed some school-yard level wit. These videos will certainly be as effective for the demographic they work for on TV, perhaps even more-so due to ease of dissemination. But as a young voter with no affection for budgie smugglers, big ears, or goofy laughs, they bore me.

This is a problem that plagues much of Labor’s youtube offering as well, sans budgie-smugglers. One alternative approach being attempted is a more conversational – almost video-diary – series of short clips, starring pollies like Julia Gillard and Nicola Roxon. They provide a slightly more intimate, conversational tone than the Liberal party’s videos, striving to humanise the subjects. It’s an interesting strategy, but not one that seems to be cutting too deeply, with only a few thousand views on the most popular videos, while the Liberal channel has one ad with over 70,000. Quality over quantity, perhaps. Labor’s channel is still more popular than Snoozeville, population: The Nationals.

On Twitter, the numbers fall to Labor, with Gillard scoring more than twice as many followers as Tony Abbott. Whoever is in charge of the PM’s tweets is also far more active than Abbott’s tweetbot, with 21 since she climbed over Rudd’s political corpse, to Abbott’s 4. All in less than three weeks. Another notable difference is that Gillard’s tweet-bot has seen fit to follow almost half of the PM’s twitter followers (to Abbott’s 20), a continuation of the youtube effort to be ‘closer’ and more accessible to the little person.

Accessibility is not, however, a big scorer for the Labor party’s facebook page, cheesily named “LaborConnect”, saddled with a logo that will make many young voters think of the Red Ring of Death of Microsoft’s Xbox360 game console (that the RRoD was related to overheating is somewhat fitting, in the context of Labor’s backslide on climate change). Perhaps as a result of the branding problem (and being relatively difficult to find), LaborConnect has one quarter the fans of the Liberal party. When it comes to the leaders’ pages, though, that situation is reversed, with Gillard scoring just under 40,000 fans, and Abbott just under 10,000. As with twitter, Gillard has been vastly more active.

All of this is pretty poor. Many young voters will feel patronised by clumsy attempts to speak to them ‘on their level’. But for generally conservative organisations, embracing a new way of doing things is obviously difficult. It’s understandable that early efforts will be halting.

Bob Brown: The thinking woman's crumpet?

One party, though, has a reputation to uphold. The Greens are generally regarded as being an increasingly young party, with great cachet among young voters. Putting aside how accurate this is, the idea itself puts a lot of pressure on the Greens. Being a progressive party, they’re also expected to break new ground. Some recent efforts have been laudable: leading the charge has been SA Senator Sarah Hanson-Young (obligatory ‘young’ pun), with her “virgin voter” video, and offline, information pack. The most significant element of this video – beyond a lot of tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating humour – is that a young politician not only exists, but is talking to young people.  The Greens’ website has a constant stream, not just of posts from various Greens pollies’ social networks, but of comments that members of the public have made on Facebook or similar sites. Regardless of how interactive it actually is (there is no indication of source or age for these comments), it presents the image of a conversation, rather than being talked at.

But the Greens also suffer from some major problems in their use of social media. This would perhaps be unremarkable but for the need to build on the pro-green sentiment disproportionately present in the youth demographic.

Monday night was the launch of the Greens Federal election campaign, an event I attended, and willingly paid money to attend in it’s guise as fundraiser. I did not find out about it until less than 5 hours before its start, despite closely watching the facebook pages of two of the Greens parliamentarians who were in attendance, as well as the Greens’ own page. It took an obtuse reference to ‘an event’ being attended by Bob Brown to notify me of the existence of this event, but there was no more readily apparent information. For a fundraising event, spruiking a candidate and promoting the party, one would think the wider the exposure the better. I visited the Greens website, where despite event dates through the end of August, there was no mention of this one. Despite *wanting* to find information, it was only dumb luck that I was able to find an obscurely named (open) event invitation. On Facebook. And therein lies the worrying sign. Event invitations are not difficult to set up, as evidenced by the fact that one existed. But none of the official attendees had linked to the invitation. None of them had tweeted about it.

Perhaps it was a simple oversight – although a lot of people had to have failed to notice for this to be the case. Perhaps it says something about how rudimentary the deployment of social media in their strategy still is. For despite the relative skill many Greens parliamentarians have shown in mastering the free-flowing, convivial tone the majors strive for, the Greens page itself had – until recently – fewer fans than that of Gamers4Croydon, a now-deregistered party formed in the back half of 2009 to campaign on, among other things, new-media issues (disclosure – I was a senior member of G4C). There was very little policy difference between the two parties, and the primary driver of online ‘buzz’ was an issue – video game classification – on which both parties had identical positions.

So why is the Greens’ online presence still struggling to get on its feet? Both Sarah Hanson-Young’s, and Melbourne candidate Adam Bandt’s youtube videos demonstrate that the Greens have access to lateral thinkers, good communicators, and a wealth of technical expertise. What excuse do they have for getting other aspects of online campaigning so very wrong? If they don’t fix these holes, and soon, they may soon discover the majors have finally worked out social media, and snatched their biggest growth market out from under them.

The problem for all parties is that ‘traditional’ political advertising simply doesn’t work in the faced-paced world of the internet. Some well-made spots might cut through, but the most that political adverts generally have going for them is a captive audience on TV – something that’s becoming increasingly unreliable with the widespread use of personal video recorders and fast-forwarding of ad breaks. Where Kevin 0-Lemon, and Virgin Voter succeed is in being ‘fresh’  (despite how much of a cliché that is). Let’s face it:  not many people want to be droned at by Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard. Neither of them have the charisma to really pull off the talking head. And when people get bored on the internet, they move on; they don’t have to wait through it to get where they want to go.

Engaging young voters might be easier said than done – in fact it requires a hell of a lot of effort, I know – but the payoff is worth it. You win not just a vote, but loyalty. Obama’s social media strategy is the great success in this regard, making people from all across the US feel involved. For all the stereotypes of apathetic youth, most do care – or are capable of caring – but need to feel like they’re involved in the process, not just one of millions of rubber stamps.

2 comments to Attracting young voters? Social media fail

  • JRepeat

    I think I still count as young. I actually though that the Bob Brown picture above was on an iPad at first glance :)

    I would dearly love to be engaged by some of these political parties in the lead up to the election. Nothing has cut through yet, and who knows? They just might win my vote.

  • grimbles

    “I actually though that the Bob Brown picture above was on an iPad at first glance”

    Yeah, that definitely means you still count as young.

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