Campaigning in cyberspace

Enter YouTube. Not only do they store the file but give you code to embed the video into your website. Click on play and it acts just like a video.

From there we thought we could produce our own TV advertisement. On Australia Day, Mandla was doing the rounds on his campaign and many photos were taken. Clover Moore and Morris Iemma were at one of the events that he attended. We managed to get a shot of Moore and Iemma sitting next to each other but looking away from each other. So the Tired, Angry and Won’t Talk ad was born.

I simply used a video editing program (Pinnacle Studio 8) that came with the PC, spliced in the photos and did the commentary over the top. The total cost was our time. We achieved over 600 views for this ad on the site: not bad for a candidate running for office and up there with the views of the TV political ads that were posted during the campaign. Brian Murphy of the Sydney Morning Herald described my voice-over as having the potential to make ears bleed, which is probably a fair assessment!

As far as we know, this is the first time political advertising has been developed solely for the Internet in Australia. Whether this medium will become important is too early to tell, but is unlikely to make a great impact while we have what Fairfax Media Chief David Kirk calls “Fraudband” (but that is another article).

As yet we don’t have the online culture of the Americans. The 2008 Presidential elections will be the first time online campaigning comes to the fore. The Barack Obama Think Different YouTube ad has so far had over three million views (that’s a top rating show in Australia).

With a week to go before the election, we were notified that we had won the best election website awarded by Independent NSW. This award was from a group whose main concern is the role of independent candidates and MP’s. Not bad for a major party.

One of the reasons we won the award was that we supplied polling, how-to-vote and where-to-vote information. I was surprised how few others did this. In the electorate of Sydney, 10,291 or one in five did not vote on the day but voted by other means - pre-poll, postal and absentee votes. Our how-to-vote information was viewed 472 times or by nearly 1 per cent of the electorate. This might not sound like a lot, but it is in a tight contest.

These figures were reflected in other electorates. So with 20 per cent of the electorate voting by other means, parties need to start looking seriously at this group and online is an ideal way to reach them.

We used the open source Mambo content management system for the website. Mambo is fully customisable. I did do some programming modifications but this is not necessary for the average website. One of the benefits of using Mambo is they have a huge development community building all kinds of “add ons” that are easy to implement.

Will, our campaign manager, wanted a count down on the site - 12 days to go to get rid of Labor! Searching through the library of available add ons, I found a fully customisable countdown add on. All it took was five minutes to download, install and customise to achieve what Will wanted.

Having a great website is useless if you are not getting traffic. There are three ways to generate traffic:

• plaster your URL everywhere;
• get your search optimisation strategy right; and/or
• get an article written about you in the paper.