Social Media

My own paper was next at CMPM2014, presenting our work on the Twitter activities by and directed at candidates in the 2013 Australian federal election. Here are the slides, with audio to come:

Twitter in the 2013 Australian Election from Axel Bruns

Up next at CMPM2014 is Stephen Dann, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by Australian political parties. He followed the 31 of the 77 candidates in the Western Australian Senate re-election who were present on Twitter (27 of whom actually posted any content), and found, in short, that what they were posting was not authentic communication.

Stephen's approach was to examine what candidates were doing in Twitter before, during, and after the election campaign. This may include original content, reactions to other people's tweets, or sharing material from outside of Twitter. Overall, then, tweets fit five broad categories: conversation (through @replies), news updates (sharing newsworthy content), passing along other people's content, maintaining a social presence, and broadcast of experiences and opinion. And spam is another possibility, sadly, often hijacking hashtags or conversations or replaying the same message from multiple accounts.

Next up at CMPM2014 is Wayne Burns from ACIL Allen Consulting, who presents the corporate perspective on campaigning. Corporate public advocacy campaigning is back in Australia, he says – previously, the marketplace of voices in public policy making had been quite small, but especially through the incorporation of social media into political discourse this has changed considerably.

Australians have very low trust in corporations, while NGOs are seen very positively; this has led to corporations becoming increasingly active in public campaigning as well. Corporate public affairs efforts are essentially on methamphetamine these days, Wayne says, and shows The Guardian's "Three Little Pigs" ads as an example of how social media are now affecting public discussion about political issues.

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Michael Crosby from United Voice, who is discussing political campaigning outside election campaigns. Australian unions' ability to organise is widely recognised, even in spite of the overall decline in union membership in developed nations. Union volunteers are still crucial in many campaigns both during and outside elections.

Michael highlights the great sacrifices made by union volunteers, who commit a great amount of their time to organising even in addition to their work obligations, and amongst these especially flags the work of union members with comparatively poor working conditions, such as early childhood educators.

Past union campaigns which addressed this group have been relatively unsuccessful, because they followed traditional union lines without understanding the specific work environment in this area. Instead, there was a need to research the profession more closely: to understand the situation of workplaces in the sector, their profitability and level of staff turnover, and the feasibility of union action.

From the two Coalition speakers at CMPM2014 we now move on to an ALP-themed panel, starting with Skye Laris, the Director of Digital for the Australia Labor Party. She says that in 2013 Labor used online media to push power down and out, trying to engage with a new supporter base and increasing its email address base tenfold over the course of a year. It has also amassed a strong following on Facebook, and used Facebook advertising extensively during the campaign.

This has resulted in a 1000% in online donations (to $800,000) from 2010 to 2013, and a 1500% increase in donors (over 10,000). 15,000 signed up online to become Labor volunteers. Such contacts were also used to source real stories about how Liberal policies would affect them, and to disseminate these stories through social media. Photos and other media generated by supporters were collected and curated online.

Once advertising is comparatively cheap and has a wide reach; it is also easier to target effectively at specific demographics. It leverages organic networks, and can build on organic user-led distribution by reinforcing stories which are already being disseminated widely. This also provides better opportunities for participation in campaigning, especially for people who are time-poor and cannot engage in other ways; it also generates immediate feedback on policies, agendas, and campaigns.

The final speaker at CMPM2014 today is Campbell Klose, and adviser on the wildly successful Cathy McGowan campaign which managed to unseat Liberal shadow minister Sophie Mirabella in the electorate of Indi in the 2013 Australian federal election. Indi is a very large electorate (roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts), with some 100,000 voters.

Early on, the Voice 4 Indi campaign began by holding some 55 kitchen table conversations with 425 participants, covering local and national issues. The results of this process were taken to Mirabella, who fundamentally disagreed with them and suggested Indi-ans cared only about cost of living issues; in response, the campaign vetted several candidates and finally settled on Cathy McGowan.

V4I then attracted volunteers, with each volunteer having to sign up to a shared value statement. These volunteers covered the entire political spectrum from the left to the right, and represented all the geographical areas covered by the electorate. Social media was used extensively to break down the geographical boundaries (such as mountain chains) separating these different areas – and the campaign conducted significant social media training with its diverse group of volunteers.

The final speaker in the ASMC14 session is Axel Maireder, whose focus is on the structure of the Twittersphere surrounding the recent European Union election. His approach is to examine the follower networks of participants in relevant discussions, and to explore which factors explain their structural patterns – such as shared national and language identity, political ideology, or other factors.

The study captured all tweets containing keywords such as European Parliament, European Election, and relevant hashtags (in the various European languages), and gathered tweets from some 440,000 users in total. Filtering these to users with at least two tweets and at least 250 followers resulted in some 11,000 core users who were retained for the network analysis.

Up next at ASMC14 is Jacob Ørmen, whose interest is in the processes of news engagement. News has always been conveyed to others through many different channels, importantly also including ordinary political conversations between everyday people. Social media and similar sites facilitate such conversations, but this also needs to be placed in a wider context that also recognises other such conversations.

In which situations, then, do people engage in such conversations about politics? When and where do they do so? Jacob has examined this for the case of Denmark, where political engagement generally is fairly strong; Danes generally like to talk about politics, but do not necessarily do so online. Jacob's approach to researching this has used surveys and interviews to explore how people choose their spaces for political discussion.

He has defined a number of types: mixed sharers, who talk face to face, but mostly on social media; conversationalists who mainly use face to face; news consumers who receive but do not discuss political news; and disengaged citizens. Conversationalists and news consumers receive information via face to face, email, SMS, phone, and social media, but do not themselves further the discussion through electronic media forms; conversationalists tend to be older or of school age, while mixed sharers are largely early to middle-aged adults.

The second speaker in this ASMC14 session is Edoardo Novelli, whose interest is in the online activities around the recent election of the Italian President. While the President was elected by members of parliament, a great deal of alternative direct democracy activities took place online, driven especially by the Cinque Stelle movement of Beppe Grillo.

Edoardo conducted an analysis of social as well as mainstream media activities around the election, gathering data from newspapers and television, Internet and social media. During the election, the Net was used by various actors for official and unofficial forms of communication. This caused a change in the traditional flows of information and diffusion across a hybrid news system, impacted on traditional political communication practices, and allowed for the emergence of grassroots voices.

Largely, the Net has been used by parties and politicians for official and political communications. Cinque Stelle ran an online poll of its members as an alternative election to that of the President; important political meetings were broadcast live, and thereby turned into performances; Twitter was used very widely to convene demonstrations; social media were used to comment on events during the election process; political leaders were taking directly to social media to bypass conventional communication channels; party Websites and politican blogs also played a role.

The next session at ASMC14 starts with Eirik Vatnøy, who takes a rhetorical perspective in his approach to Twitter. Social media are an arena for political debate, but how do they change the norms and praxis of political rhetoric? Eirik interviewed Twitter users who engaged in continuous political debate on the platform.

Rhetorics considers the public sphere as a reticulate public sphere (made up of many smaller spheres), and this applies to Twitter as well. Actors recognise the discursive and social norms which uphold such spheres, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of communicative activities can help to explore these norms. However, this is a complex challenge, as different users may use the various affordances of Twitter as a platform in different ways.

Eirik interviewed 18 users, chosen through snowball selection; they included active politicians, editors, journalists, bloggers, communication workers, lawyers, etc. Interviews were structured around key themes including perceived affordances, toles and relations, discursive norms, and social norms.