How Fianna failed and the Fine-gall of it all.

There’s a bit of an arms race going on at the moment between NI parties as to who can be the most ‘connected’ on the internet. I’ve noticed that for each party there seems to be a different approach and there’s a mixture of lip-service and genuine attempts to engage with the online electorate.

But, it’s plainly obvious that some of the parties’ press offices have had their heads turned by the stonking success of Obama’s online take-over. He set the bar high – it’s near Hubble, yet our local political parties are aiming for Sleive Donard.

The internet can be a dangerous platform for a political party to try and compete on, but equally a very effective one.

The two main parties in the south found themselves on the wrong end of a ‘bloglash’ earlier this year. In February keen Dublin bloggers attended what they understood to be a talk by Obama’s net-guru Joe Rospars. In the end it turned out to be a bit of a PR stunt on Fianna Fail’s part to lure bloggers to a launch event for their new website. It was ironic that after recently enlisting the architects of Obama’s campaign Blue State Digital, FF could be party to such a naive act of duping the online community.

Mamapoulet, one of the bloggers who attended the event summed the whole affair up:

“If Fianna Fail wanted to launch their online engagement strategy to an audience of bloggers and social media activists then they should have done the full bells and whistles launch and invited us all – we would have been there with bells on no matter if we voted or not.
“Fianna Fáil just misjudged how to do things with the very varied audience in the room.”

Then, without missing a beat Finegael weighed in with their new web strategy and another new party website.

But hold on shouted the Irish blogosphere, doesn’t this site look a lot like the BBC homepage? 

It did, because it was.  Basically, FG’s IT manager put an advert on a freelance web developer website for someone to create a website similar to the BBC’s homepage. This request and the subsequent offered contract (taking the word “literal” to a completely new dimension) produced a lovely carbon copy of the Beeb’s site. 

Again, back to Mamapoulet:

“Above all this incident is about the second biggest party in the state and another example of it’s lack of serious commitment to on-line engagement with voters in the country,  a lack of faith in Irish based web developers, and no imagination in the excuse making department either!

“I know many commentators are fed up listening to Irish politicians invoke Obama when talking about online engagement and voters . We need not worry about Fine Gael – they are so far from Obama’s technological savvy here that they will not be tarred with the brush of Obama Juice seeking.”

The problem with the success of people like Joe Rospars and the Obama campaign is that every political campaign manager now sees the internet as the golden ticket. They see the millions of dollars in donations that Obama raised through his website, and the massive effect it had in putting his message to the masses and they think: “I’ll have me some of that.”

But from what I’ve seen in Northern Ireland, most of it is lip service.

It’s all very well setting up a Twitter account, but then to use it only as a tool to broadcast press releases is completely missing the point. 

To have a blog, but not actually ask any questions on it… or worse –  not even allow commenting, is completely missing the point.

To use Youtube as a way of getting your message out, without the fear of being asked awkward questions by the media, is… completely missing the point.

 

As our southern counterparts proved, you can spend a fortune on a fancy new site, set up social networking accounts and hire in the big guns, but it’s what’s under the bonnet that counts. Be that the CSS code that betrayed Finegael as the online amateurs they are, or the actual intent and understanding of how to use these powerful applications (or lack of) which caught out Fianna Fail in the end. 

I want to see our local politicians use the web as a way of engaging with the electorate, and not as a mere marketing gimmick.

It’s obvious that the European Elections are being used as a testing ground for online engagement in Northern Ireland, and hopefully at the end of it we wont just have a bunch of Obamawannabies  ’twittering’ with themselves, but a political scene actively involved in Politics 2.0.

Scotland talks about the ‘National Conversation’, I’m looking forward our ‘n@ional conversaton’.

See you at PiCamp!

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