Webinar

European elections 09:

Social media insights

Agenda

01

02Online political debates: a lack of European digitalpublic space

What is social media for citizens and what are the political consequences?

03 MEP 2.0: what shall be in a name?

04 So what can we do? Best practice and next steps

01What is social media for citizens and what are the political consequences?

Citizens talking to other citizens through diverse « social » web tools

New ways of sharing and expressing public opinions…

… with more and more importance of peer-to-peer recommendation

… but a few opinion formers who are over-represented in terms of share of voice

Social media: a growth that impacts every EU citizen

• Social Media is experiencing rapid global growth and is now a key part of

consumers’ daily media habits, taking time spent away from traditional media

• New ways to leverage opinions and to influence like TV did before.

Sources: eMarketer; EIAA / Comscore (Europe)

02Online political debates: a lack of European digitalpublic space

A growing interest limited to a short period of time (2 months before the elections)

• German citizens definitely more looking for

information than French-speaking and

English-speaking ones

• One key news article seem to drive

attention:" Why should you vote?”

Twitter: flavor of the month or new political trend?

���� A missed weapon

Still, MEPs trail behind their American counterparts. Of the 535 members of Congress, 116 are already using Twitter (22%). On this side of the Atlantic, only 27 MEPs use Twitter: just 3.5% of the 785 members of the European Parliament.http://www.euractiv.com/en/eu-elections/twittering-meps-fail-embrace-internet-craze/article-182511

Microblogging is a new way of communicating all over Europe: 140 signs to leverage word-of-mouth

http://www.tweetelect09.eu/country/Greece

Search word: ‘twitter’ in Poland Source: Google Trends

http://www.tweetelect09.eu/

A dedicated interactive platform that was only used as a push of information

Problem is that this kind of tool was not perfectly used by politicians: the @ RT effect

A push of information, butrare conversations that

could improve theword-of-mouth: a missed

opportunity

Facebook: amazing CRM that was just used as a static promotion tool

“The point is not to have a million people. The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.”

-Joe Rospars, Obama’s campaign’s new-media director

Few people engaged on main social networks like Facebook on

European elections groups and very few interactions

Conclusion: The European debate did not really exist

Conversations and discussions, when they occur, are :

- on spaces such as personal or mainstream blogs, news…

- limited and restricted to a national / local scope- limited and restricted to a national / local scope

- driven by national parties

- polluted by populists and “affairs”

European elections #1: A local focus

• Discussions about European issues seem to be more oriented

around local questions and seem to follow national issues

• English is the communication language, but it is suprising that

the volume is not so much bigger than French

Source: BlogPulseComparaison between Polish and French blogospheres

On more direct European topics like « Treaty of Lisbon », it seems like there’s a stronger connection between national contexts

� A community of interests but no bridge

• Topics are the same in the different countries but they experience different

share of voices, depending on the national context.

• No direct link is made between the issues. They are discussed on a national

scope.

France European level

France UK

• The various EP groups are perceived in a very different proportion, in the UK

blogosphere and in the French one. It depends on the local context and on

how national parties are already present. Nonetheless, EGP did an

astonishing job in France, as it changed the political ecosystem in French

social media

• Local parties & politicians are true conversation and attention filters, the

European debate is first a national one

European elections #2: national parties & politicians as true conversation filters

France: UMP, Jean Sarkozy

Czech Republic: crisis at stake

• Political agenda is still mainly driven by national organisations

ID GU/NGL

Les Verts ADLE

PSE

European elections #3: each EP group has a very specific semantics, and then a territory

UMPLes Verts ADLE UMP

• Because their territories are very different, no true & visible lign of

political opposition emerged

European elections #4: populist and « affairs » pollute this European debate

• Buzz did not focus on rational debates but on emotional disputes

• The traditional media was a true source of buzz (even negative) in social media

Wikio top videos: Cohn-Bendit insulted by Bayrou was at the heart of discussion 2 days before the elections

03MEP 2.0: what shall be in a name?

Alexander Alvaro, MEP 2.0

An MEP with high online engagement

� Very few backlings

1http://www.flensburg.julis.de/index.php?id=37842http://twitter.com/JuLi_Man3http://www.facebook.com/pages/JuLiman/1942617755954http://www.fdp-meinerzhagen.de/5http://www.julis-potsdam.de/6http://www.fdp-mannheim.de/7http://www.fdp-luedenscheid.de/8http://www.fdp-bw.de/regional/home.php?kvid=Mannheim9http://www.liberale.de/webcom/show_article.php?wc_c=460.....10http://www.fdp.de/webcom/show_article.php?wc_c=460&wc_i.....11http://julis.potsdam-liberal.de/inhalte/grundsatzprogra.....12http://julis.potsdam-liberal.de/inhalte/grundsatzprogra.....

• MEP Alvaro now occupies the social media, but needs to

engage more deeply in the conversations

The difference with politicians 2.0 and active citizen bloggers: leveraging word-of-mouth thanks to deeper conversation

Benoit HamonPSE

Samuel AuthueilCitizen

Deeper conversation,so deeper impact

in diverse communities

Shorter conversation,so a smaller

word-of-mouth

04 So what can we do? Best practice and next steps

Barack Obama: towards reputation democracy

Obama recognised that the young influential vote was not reachable through a TV spot bombardment

Social media raised awareness and drove engagement:- Presence in 15 social networks- 5 million ‘Friends’- 3 million online donors

The Obama campaign delivered a continuous conversation with potential voters. Social Media connected with a young audience using social networks, blogging and video sharing applications

- 3 million online donors

Once elected, Obama reduced activity and received a negative reaction, demonstrating the need to maintain relationships with consumers who have invested time into your brand

Europe Ecologie – EuropeanGreens.eu• A campaign that started last October

• Simple movement focusing on crisis solutions

• A centralization on a single platform (netvibes) of all the

various declarations and ideas

• A mix of tactic buzz (like lipdub) in which the politicians

played themselves the game and embodied the political

thoughts in the same storyline: voting can change thoughts in the same storyline: voting can change

things

• A multichannel approach to leverage word-of-mouth

thanks to diverse interaction opportunities

• More than 1000+ meetings organised thanks to social

media but happening « in real life »

� Europe Ecologie as a hub of conversation, moments and

transformation into what seems to be a concrete

political action

ALDE Civil Liberties Campaign: offline & online activations hand in hand

• A civil liberties logo and webpage was designed. Members of the ALDE group were

encouraged to post contents. Concurrently, a civil liberties blog was developed, launched by

campaign leader Alexander Alvaro MEP using Facebook and Twitter to encourage civil

liberties activitists and supporters to share content and ultimately build a European civil

liberties movement.

• Journalists, NGOs and MEPs received an invitation by e-mail alert, intended to be read on

Blackberries and other personal devices, with a warning that the message may be read and

recorded according to current data retention laws if routed via the US.

• Campaign activation items were designed to make the campaign real and relevant to

people’s lives. A powerful short film on freedom of speech and anti-discrimination was

produced, based on the well-known holocaust poem “First they came for.. ” And posted on

YouTube. The poem was also produced in the form of a fridge magnet with topical subjects

added to enable people to make their own modern day versions of the poem.

• The first European Civil Liberties Day was inaugurated on 15 April by ALDE President Graham

Watson in the presence of over 100 members of the ALDE group, other MEPs, journalists and

NGOs.50 influential bloggers on the theme of Civil Liberties were also contacted.

• In total, a selection of 400 journalists and 150 NGOs from all 27 EU Member States were

informed about the campaign and invited to the European Civil Liberties Day. A petition

supporting an annual European Civil Liberties Day was launched on the blog. Over 23,000

contacts on Twitter have been registered, over 550 friends have joined the civil liberties

cause on Facebook and the ALDE civil liberties video against discrimination is provoking

intense interest on YouTube.

So what’s next?

• The record low turnout and low conversation level in

European social media does not mean that there’s no

community of interest online

• Blogs and social media were not fully exploited and

leveraged (only European Greens engaged some of them leveraged (only European Greens engaged some of them

into the political debate)

• Language is a limit that can not really improve the

European political debate: why not a European platform

centralizing diverse points of views that are happening

online and moderated by citizens in diverse languages?