Greens jump on the Twitter Bandt-wagon

a href=”http://www.nowuc.com.au/2010/10/09/greens-jump-on-the-twitter-bandt-wagon/bandt/” rel=”attachment wp-att-1256″>By ELIZABETH DREYER
AUSTRALIA'S sole Greens MP has praised social media as a major part of his success in the recent Federal Election. More and more politicians, journalists and news organisations are moving into the social media realm, with Twitter in particular becoming common practice in this profession.

But just how many votes are affected by this new election tool?

Adam Bandt, the only Greens member to hold a seat in the House of Representatives, said that the Greens generally receive less coverage in traditional media than the major parties and they felt compelled to step up their social media status to make up for this.

“Social media, Twitter in particular, allowed us to challenge the dominance that the two major parties have in traditional media formats,” he said. “We ran a grass roots campaign that relied heavily on social media to publicise our events and policies and to connect with voters in the seat of Melbourne and beyond.”

ABC political journalist and avid Twitter user, Annabel Crabbe, said that social media can be an effective way of reaching voters if used in the right way. She said that many MPs, including Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot, opened Twitter accounts a few months before the campaign but then failed to use them effectively.

“Many of these politicians are just learning and they can’t suddenly start using Twitter and expect it to be effective,” she said.

Abbott’s Twitter account in particular left a lot to be desired, with only two Tweets during the week leading up to the election (both on 17th August), with no other Tweets since.

Crabbe said that Twitter was still a very new and different audience, and a lot of them were very well informed on politics, as well as being extremely cynical.

“Social media needs to be used for much deeper engagement than traditional media can provide, but a lot of politicians aren’t using it to their advantage,” she said.

Dr Tim Butcher, head of the School of Management at RMIT, agrees, he said that politicians were generally not using social media to their best advantage.

“They’re failing to engage with voters in discussions, and simply telling us what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Crabbe believes that neither of our current party leaders used Twitter as effectively as ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd used social media intelligently, in that his Tweets were generally significantly different to what was being reported in traditional media, and was not used purely to re-state what had already been reported elsewhere, according to Crabbe.

Malcolm Turnbull and Mike Rann were two others that Crabbe named as being effective Twitter users. She said Turnbull is extremely ‘tech savvy’ and you can guarantee he will be the first politician to release something on Twitter when it first breaks in parliament.

“I sat next to him at a Walkley’s conference we were both speaking at and I watched him reading an article on his iPad and using Twitter on his Blackberry at the same time,” she laughed. “He was still going by the time we were getting up on stage!”

While South Australian Premier Mike Rann is not quite as addicted to new technology, Crabbe says he used social media very effectively in an area that has only one daily newspaper. He responded to the news the paper reports and was always keeping his constituents updated, she said.

While the general opinion is that politicians use social media in order to connect with the youth audience, both Butcher and Crabbe say this is not an accurate perception.

“In reality, social media reaches out to a much broader demographic,” Butcher said. “It’s more about trying to integrate social media into people’s lives.”

And this is exactly what Adam Bandt aimed to do with his use of social media, he said he wanted to have a campaign that was responsive and driven by people on the ground.

“Social media allowed me to take into consideration the questions and concerns of the people of Melbourne and to feed these back in to the campaign and policy process,” he said. “Without the use of social media, it is unlikely I would have had the opportunity to have some personal contact with these people.”

Yet there still seemed to be a great number of politicians who have not embraced the new phenomena of social media. Whether it is due to “old school thinking” as stated by Butcher, or because they believe it’s just a passing fad, these politicians may have to rethink their position if the ‘Twitter election’ trend continues.

Butcher says that it’s important to remember that most of these politicians are not working on their own.

“There are social media experts who keep this going, which is often why politicians appear to use a ‘low risk’ strategy in their approach to social media,” he said.

However, exposure of politicians is not limited to their own Twitter and Facebook accounts. They can also benefit from the social media use of journalists, news organisations and even the general public.

Butcher said that this opens up forums for discussion and allows for a more even debate, even if this is not always positive for politicians.

Crabbe agrees, she said that Twitter gives voters the latest snapshot of a story, no matter who breaks it.

“The important thing to remember is that what you read on Twitter is not necessarily what the case will be by the end of the day, because it gets updated so regularly,” she said.

So with such a drastic change in the use of social media between the 2007 and 2010 elections, what will be the story by 2013?

Butcher says there is no way of knowing, but technology is bound to change in the next three to four years.

“Twitter and Facebook are still so new, and with technology and social networking changing so rapidly, the only question to ask is ‘Where will it go next?’”