Blog

By Chris­tine Hüb­n­er.

In the past cou­ple of weeks I have been spend­ing a whole lot of time online. Actu­al­ly I think I’ve spent more time online than usu­al – if that’s even pos­si­ble for a mem­ber of the online gen­er­a­tion. We’ve been mon­i­tor­ing the polit­i­cal cam­paigns around the Ger­man par­lia­men­tary elec­tions held in late Sep­tem­ber. Half out of sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty and half because we fig­ured we would be fol­low­ing close­ly any­ways, we want­ed to keep an eye out on how the can­di­dates run­ning for the six hun­dred some­thing man­dates in Germany’s nation­al par­lia­ment would make use of the Inter­net in their campaigns.

We were par­tic­u­lar­ly curi­ous because there had been quite some advances ear­li­er this year that let us believe the par­ties had a real plan on how to use the Inter­net in their campaigns:

• Chan­cel­lor Merkel ordered all her MPs to fol­low manda­to­ry social media train­ings, and had giv­en cit­i­zens the chance to chat with her dur­ing a first live ses­sion via Google Hang­out.
• The Social Democ­rats sent their own researchers to the US to learn from Barack Oba­ma & Co. how they led such suc­cess­ful online cam­paigns in the past. And they hired a media agency only for their online campaign.
• The Greens sched­uled to spend 80% of their cam­paign bud­get on online media, rough­ly 4.4 mil­lion Euros.
• For the first time the omni-web-present Pirate par­ty would send their own can­di­dates into the race. They could rea­son­ably be expect­ed to spend the entire bud­get of around 1 mil­lion Euros online – as if they would know what else to do with it.
• And in addi­tion to all this, there had been (semi-)party-affiliated media agen­cies and think tanks mush­room­ing in Berlin dur­ing the past leg­isla­tive peri­od: wit­ty names such as CNetz, D64 and Digiges thought out by peo­ple who embarked in boost­ing their party’s online com­pe­tence to a whole new level.

Despite all this dri­ving our hope, after 4 weeks of mon­i­tor­ing we find hor­ren­dous deficits when it comes to online cam­paign­ing of indi­vid­ual MP can­di­dates. Deficits that real­ly leave me puz­zled about what it was exact­ly that the par­ties set out to do online in this campaign.

We par­tic­u­lar start­ed our research by explor­ing the online sphere from the per­spec­tive of a cit­i­zen who needs to not only make a choice for a par­ty over­all, but also choose a direct man­date can­di­date to rep­re­sent her region specif­i­cal­ly. Assum­ing we would look for infor­ma­tion on the can­di­dates in var­i­ous regions we exam­ined their Google hits, web and social media pres­ence. While the can­di­dates of Chris­t­ian and Social Democ­rats often boast­ed slick web­sites with lit­tle con­tent, can­di­dates of the small­er par­ties were some­times even nowhere to be found online. We were star­tled when we realised that half of the can­di­dates in our sam­ple who had a Face­book pro­file (yay!) had dis­abled the com­ment func­tion to not let peo­ple leave them a mes­sage (nay!).

Face­book page with­out comments

I am most star­tled by the use of video footage online: a mea­gre 20% of the 152 can­di­dates mon­i­tored in our sam­ple used some form of video mes­sage to address cit­i­zens online. Maybe one or two had a prop­er set of videos geared towards recent events or as answers ques­tions from cit­i­zens. Dear can­di­dates, any 16-year-old can do bet­ter than this! Look at Youtube and the num­ber of clicks some of these kids with their bub­bly mono­logues and shaky cam­era per­spec­tive get and you might be able to fig­ure out why the num­ber of non-vot­ers was high­est in the group of 18–25 year olds. These smart­phone-tied kids do not think about your TV ads or dis­cuss your over­sized bill­boards – because they sim­ply do not see them. They do not watch TV and do not look out on the street while rid­ing the bus.

Any 16-year old Youtu­ber can do better

In total the par­ties have spent about 70 mil­lion Euros in this year’s cam­paign, of which SPD and CDU have had the lion’s share of around 20 mil­lion each.  Enough to spend some of it on a prop­er web­site tem­plate for their can­di­dates, you would think. But mon­ey was first and fore­most spent on tra­di­tion­al cam­paign­ing uten­sils: TV ads, road­side bill­boards, give­away fly­ers, and – you wouldn’t believe they still do this – in-house mail­ings. While in absolute terms peo­ple still watch a lot of TV in Ger­many – more than 3.5 hours per day – the dai­ly hours of TV con­sump­tion have for the first time in ages decreased in 2012, par­tic­u­lar­ly dri­ven by the younger age groups who watch less and less TV and migrate to oth­er media instead. Based on these (pub­licly avail­able) fig­ures and the easy equa­tion “younger age groups = future vot­ers” any rea­son­able media con­sul­tant should have advised to spread efforts over online and offline media. Espe­cial­ly at the base with thou­sands of MP can­di­dates the advan­tages of tar­get­ed online com­mu­ni­ca­tion should be all the much big­ger than of the gen­er­al nation­al TV spot.

Now, I have been rack­ing my brain for a while already about this:

• I know from expe­ri­ence how dif­fi­cult and nerve-wreck­ing it can be to build a good web pres­ence and it is cer­tain­ly not some­thing you get right overnight.
• It takes a lot of time and effort to be online.
• I have also seen what can hap­pen with politi­cians who put them­selves out there in the online pub­lic space and get run over by shit storms, so I under­stand that there may be some reser­va­tions to the trial-and-error-technique.

But giv­en that the word of the rise of the Inter­net has been out there for a while, I would have expect­ed more can­di­dates to be able to han­dle these chal­lenges. There have been few indi­vid­ual can­di­dates in our sam­ple who are doing a won­der­ful job with their online pres­ence. What strikes me, how­ev­er, is the struc­tur­al deficit that we see across all par­ties: despite their efforts announced in advance there is no par­ty whose can­di­dates can be large­ly exempt­ed from this crit­i­cism or show that they are on the right path at least. I can­not get rid of the feel­ing that some­one either did not do their home­work here or was pur­pose­ful­ly ignor­ing his or her com­mon sense regard­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion trends of the 21^st cen­tu­ry. Obvi­ous­ly, my log­ic has to be flawed some­where, because I am think­ing that there need to be peo­ple in the whole mag­ic cir­cle of pol­i­tics and advi­so­ry who should have known bet­ter how to set up a prop­er online cam­paign for their MP can­di­dates (or sim­ply be able to use Youtube for that mat­ter). Can it be so dif­fi­cult or the fear of fail­ure so big as not to try?

If any­one of you is read­ing this, dear mem­bers of the cam­paign teams, of CNetz, D64 or Digiges, please let us know what the online plan for your par­ties is – because WE COULDN’T SEE ANY OF IT! Please, any­one of the strat­e­gy cir­cles of the big par­ties, helps us out and tell us what the next online-steps for your par­ties and politi­cians will be. Oth­er­wise, this will keep bug­ging my mind for long. Thank you!

PS: You can read the report on find­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions (in Ger­man) HERE.

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Chris­tine Hüb­n­er is a part­ner at d|part.

Dis­claimer

The views and opin­ions expressed in this arti­cle are those of the author.

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Pic­ture:  No Inter­net Con­nec­tion by Ben Dal­ton (own work) via Flickr, released under Cre­ative Commons.