Update: The parties' social networking

Time to update our site audit chart, listing the social networking offerings of the four major national parties.

The Liberals got their online act together in the second week, adding Twitter and MySpace pages and expanding their use of Flickr and YouTube. But it is the NDP that reaping the greatest rewards from these tools, adding more than 2,600 "supporters" in Facebook in the past week to the Conservatives 1,550. The Liberals and the Greens each gained about 650 supporters over the same period.

The NDP also gained about 350 Twitter "followers" to the Conservatives' 240. The Liberals are new to the Twitter game, adding 292 followers in their first week. Based on those numbers, I suspect that most (for all the parties) are insiders.

If the Greens have started using Flickr, Twitter or Friendfeed to get their message across, they aren't effectively promoting that on their website, hence all that white space under the Greens. But they are making effective use of YouTube now to share videos of Elizabeth May's campaign speeches on their party website, adding five new videos in the past day. And if you search hard enough on YouTube, you'll find their page.

Finally, the Conservatives show no signs of stopping on the electronic campaign trail, adding a Digg page to their site links this week. No friends there yet, but the campaign is still young.

Site or tool	Conservative	Liberal	NDP	Green
Facebook (# of supporters)	14,673	13,155	17,277	3,158
Flickr	Yes	Yes	Yes
Friendfeed	Yes		Yes
MySpace (# of friends)	Yes (45)	Yes (37)
RSS feeds	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Twitter (# of followers)	Yes (693)	Yes (292)	Yes (786)*
YouTube (# of videos)	Yes (16)	Yes (51)	Yes (55)	Yes (17)

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Free advice for politicians

In the newspaper business it is common practise for editors and reporters to search the archives and the Internet for an unfamiliar newsmaker's name to see what comes up. When we forget to do that (been there, done that) we are sometimes embarassed the next day by our competition.

NDP Leader Jack Layton might be feeling some of that morning-after regret today upon learning that his party's (now former) candidate in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast posted video depicting his apparent use of illicit drugs on marijuana advocate Marc Emery's site PotTV. That's a habit Google could have revealed to curious party officials in 0.14 seconds.

(Maybe the innovative folks at Google Labs should create a more focused search engine: Google Background Check?)

There's a reason "google" has become a verb and could also be a synonym for "cover your butt." If, for example, the Liberal party had Googled "green shift" they might have avoided an embarassing spat over the name of their green plan and whatever licensing fee they agreed to pay to settle the disupte. (Or maybe not, given they were aware of the conflict enough to try sticking a "the" in front.)

Okay, better example: if your humble bloggist had bothered to google the name "Campaign 2.0," he might have found his clever moniker had already been used several times before, including by the aforementioned competition. So, in the spirit of things, let me say I am embarassed by this lapse of judgment and take full responsibility. I apologize without reservation to my family, colleagues and leader and beg your forgiveness. I'm a human!

MORE FREE ADVICE: As my friend Paul Gorbould noted in a message yesterday about the Conservatives' disappearing Dionbook site, thanks to Google cacheing and the Internet museum site The Wayback Machine, you can't un-publish on the Internet. He should know - he works for the CBC's Digital Archives, which has compiled historical gems from past Canadian election campaigns - and archival footage of the current party leaders - from the CBC's unrivalled library.

There's a bluebird on your shoulder

  For those of you still blissfully unaware of the "micro-blogging" site Twitter, think of it as an Internet-age telex service for the personal details of your life - or Facebook's status update without all that other stuff. (For all you need to know about Twitter, read their FAQ. Icon at right by AODDesign)

With a Twitter account, you can send out 140-letter messages that answer the question "What you are doing?" Other Twitter users who have chosen to "follow" you will get your messages on their Twitter page, or on their mobile phone.

Predictably, what started out a couple of years ago as popular site for 14-year-old girls has become a compulsory part of any company's or political party's (or newspaper's!) online marketing campaign.

Here's a sampling of yesterday's "tweets" from Canada's three largest political parties:

pmharper At the Halton campaign rally with our Halton candidate Lisa Raitt.

jacklayton LIVE on CKTB 610am (Niagara Falls), at 5:20pm or shortly after. Listen at http://www.610cktb.com/

LiberalTour Stéphane Dion joined by all NS candidates, Bob Rae, and provincial leader, Stephen MacNeil, at lunchtime meeting. 250 Liberals to boot.

The Harper and Layton campaign are so far making the most effective use of Twitter, by including weblinks to coverage of events, campaign videos etc. Barack Obama's campaign does this in nearly every Twitter post, case in point:

BarackObama Speaking in Golden, CO. Watch the event live at http://my.barackobama.com/livestream

There is a viral aspect of Twitter in that when you choose to follow someone on Twitter, they'll likely return the favour. Which leads to rather creepy notification emails like this in your inbox:

Stephen Harper is now following you on Twitter!

For the record: Jack Layton now has 718 Twitter "followers" (up from 439 last week); Stephen Harper has 633 (452 last week) and Stephane Dion 241 (in his first week as a tweeter). Compare that to 79,980 followers for Barack Obama.

AND: If you think that this is all just the meaningless fluff of a silly era, consider this post from the Twitter blog showing the volume peaks in tweets during Sarah Palin's address to the Republican National Convention, and a follow-up post comparing the volume of tweets mentioning the U.S. political candidates by name during their acceptance speeches. These analyses don't reveal how people feel about the candidates, but they sure illustrate what (or who) is drawing attention.

More shiny Internet baubles

With the self-inflicted demise of the Conservatives' Dionbook Facebook parody, let's take a quick look at the Liberals' entry in the parody website game: Scandalpedia, a Wikipedia-like "free encyclopedia" of supposed Conservative scandals.

In addition to a rather pleasing design, the site is surprisingly deep, which says something either about the extent of Liberal nitpicking or alleged Conservative malfeasance. The site includes "biographies" of Conservative figures like Environment Minister (or "former Treasury Board secretary") John Baird, campaign chair Doug Finley and former foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, and such well-worn "scandals" as the Chuck Cadman Affair and the "In-and-Out" election spending spat with Elections Canada - as well as more obscure ones (what's the "Convention fee boondoggle"?) and promises of more to come.

Truthfully, it is hard to believe that attack sites like Scandalpedia or the Conservatives' notaleader.ca really affect voter behaviour - or even attract many viewers. The site-ranking website Alexa.com reports that notaleader.ca ranks 26,960th among websites in Canada, while scandalpedia.ca sits in 51,368th spot.

But in terms of the style, maybe it's revealing that the Liberals chose to go with an encyclopedia while the Conservatives went with cartoons.

Dionbook, gonebook

Overshadowed by the fooferaw caused by a pooping puffin last week was another part of the Conservatives' notaleader.ca Dion attack site. Called Dionbook, it claimed to be "A satirical look at the Liberal Party, Ottawa and Federal politics." And it went suspiciously missing late last week in the wake of Puffingate, as several bloggers and newspapers noted.

In addition to including parodies of Liberal bloggers among Dion's "supporters," the site listed "Let's bring the Taliban to Canada" and "I eat my hot dog with a knife and fork" among Dion's subscribed "groups." (See a jpeg of Google's last cached version of the site at right, minus the images, which were not captured by the cache - and click for a larger image.)

Hard to tell exactly which of the above attempts at humour was enough to cause second thoughts among the overseers of the Conservative war room. And if you're puzzling over the hot dog reference, mabye there's a clue in this interesting bit of Quebec election ephemera from a note on the CBC Digital Archives Facebook page, explaining why you won't see Quebec politicians eating hot dogs on the campaign trail.

Liberals turning on, too

Since last week's post tallying the social networking tools offered by the major parties' websites, the Liberals have added Twitter (187 followers), Flickr and MySpace (13 friends) links to their main site.

And as commenter CHM noted, the Conservatives, like the NDP, offer a french-language Twitter feed. The Liberals' Twitter feed is bilingual.

Liberal attack Bob?

In the U.S. election, a presidential candidate's vice-presidential running mate is often seen as the "attack dog," the one to unleash some of the harder rhetoric leaving the presidential nominee to take the high ground. That was the role Dick Cheney was seen playing for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and was noted often in analysis of Barack Obama's choice of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate this time around.

The role obviously isn't as clearly defined in Canada, but various MPs often pick up the mantle (leash?) with relish, as evidenced over the years by Conservatives Jason Kenney, Peter Van Loan and Pierre Poilievre.

Judging by the first posts on his blog since the election call, Liberal Bob Rae baring is his teeth too. Last week Rae wrote that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's campaign reminds him of a Twilight Zone episode:

(The Harper Conservatives) don't have a vision of Canada as it is, let alone as it could be. They live in a little world called Harperville. Daddy goes out to work and Mommy stays home. There are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys get killed or go to jail.

Daddy definitely knows best, and his word is law. If you like Daddy you can talk to him or even have your picture taken with him. If Daddy doesn't like you he will be very stern with you, and he won't even talk to you.
...
Wake up Canada, don't let the body snatchers put us all to sleep. This is a bad government, led by a man whose word is not his bond.

And Rae doesn't confine his barbs to the Conservatives:

Jack Layton's decision to fight Elizabeth May and the Green Party's participation in the leader's debate might surprise some. It didn't surprise me.

For a party that once immersed itself in principle, it is admittedly a come down, but it's been clear for some time now that it is narrow self-interest and not high principle that drives "Jack Layton's NDP".
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The NDP is eternally frustrated by its own decisions to put itself on the margins, and it shows its frustration by retreating to its themes: class warfare and character assassination. So it was. So it will be.