Text the (youth) vote!

The Dominion Insitute's Democracy Project is trying to encourage young people to take an interest in the election campaign through an initiative called Youth Text 2008. It's a simple plan: connect young people to the political parties via text messaging.

Youth Text 2008 provides SMS short-codes for the four main national parties (all registered parties were invited, the insitute says), so young people can send questions directly to the parties from their cellphones - and get an answer within 24 hours. Texting the word "party" signs the user up to receive regular information and alerts from the party and the opportunity to take part in electronic polls.

The codes are:

Conservatives  898272 (TXTCPC)
Greens  898476 (TXTGRN)
Liberals  898542 (TXTLIB)
NDP  898637 (TXTNDP)

(The service is free, but standard text message charges would apply - check your cellphone plan.)

The Dominion Institute is a charitable organization founded in 1997 to promote civic participation and knowledge of Canadian history through such initiatives as the Memory Project, which preserves the stories of Canada's war veterans.

But for all the institute's work in attracting the attention of young people, it released a sobering survey today showing that fewer eligible young people intend to vote in this election than in 2006, when only 44 per cent of peoplevoters under age 24 actually cast a vote.

MORE (WE MISSED IT THE FIRST TIME): The parties' attempts to reach voters through new media conduits is failing, according to another Dominion Institute survey that Political Decoder Linda Diebel wrote about last week. Just 9 per cent of respondents said the parties had reached out to voters through social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the survey. Certainly most of the parties, with the exception of the Conservatives, were slow off the mark in adopting the new media approaches in this election - but that has changed over the course of the campaign. Maybe this is the campaign that gets the parties over the hump - strange as it may be to have to say that in 2008.

Anti-Harper groups organizing online

An online "Anyone but Harper" movement is underway on Facebook groups, left-leaning blogs and websites such as, wait for it, anyonebutharper.ca. In addition to creating and hosting satirical videos attacking Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, this site is attempting to coordinate strategic voting to defeat Conservative candidates - and has a widget on its site that tells you which party has the best chance to do that for a given postal code, based on the results of the previous election.

NDP makes strides online

With two former candidates already done in by Internet posts and another under fire for comments posted earlier this year on Facebook, it might appear that the online campaign has been a disaster for the NDP. They've certainly been bitten by the "publish and perish" bug that thrives thanks to the low barrier to entry of the Internet, where everyone is free to say whatever they want and often do.

But from a party organizational point of view, the NDP's use of online tools and strategy has been very good, to this observer.

Leader Jack Layton early on in the campaign compared himself with Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as an agent of change. Whatever one thinks of that comparison, the party has certainly taken a few pages from the Obama campaign's successful Internet strategy:

- Vistors to the party's main website (ndp.ca) are met with a fullscreen invitation to donate to the party, before clicking through to the main site. Obama set a new standard by raising millions from small contributors over the Internet during the U.S. primaries and used a similar splash page.

- Layton, like all the major parties' leaders, has a Facebook page - but unlike Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he didn't cut out comments on his site. That decision came back to haunt him briefly during the controversy over the Greens' exclusion from the TV debates, but made him look democratic and flexible when he responded to this negative reaction from his own "supporters" and dropped his opposition to Elizabeth May's participation.

- The NDP was quick to follow the Conservatives in using "micro-blogging" site Twitter to send out campaign updates - but the NDP has garnered more followers than the other party and has used the short-message service more effectively. They've incorporated a Twitter alert box on their website - and more importanly, are using Twitter to promote speeches and events carried live or archived on their multimedia site www.orangeroom.ca

- As a separate brand, orangeroom.ca it is clearly aimed at a younger, more Internet savvy audience. But beyond style, it gives supporters the tools to contribute their own blogs, videos and photos to the site - as the tagline says, "Create. Share. Be a part of it." Like the Conservatives' now discredited notaleader site, some of this is silly stuff, like a caption contest to put words in Stephen Harper's mouth - but mostly it looks like a sincere attempt to increase grassroots participation in the NDP campaign. Supporters can even sign up to be "rapid-responders" to combat attacks by rival parties - again, a page taken from the Obama campaign's handbook.

It's hard to know how all this will translate into votes on election day. Television ads still seem to reach the largest audience, and the televised leaders debate is still seen as the chance for a party to make a move or reverse a failing campaign. Various tracking polls have the NDP polling anywhere from 17 to 21 per cent of decided voters this week (it received 17% of the vote in the 2006 election).

But in the online arena, the NDP are out in front in terms of harnessing the democratizing tools of the Internet for their own advantage.

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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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.

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.

Conservatives most turned on

For the record, here's a quick survey of the social network and Web 2.0 offerings on the four major national parties' websites - all linked accordingly for your convenience.

The Conservatives, with the broadest array of social networking and web tools, are clearly reaching out to electronically-linked voters, followed closely by the NDP. The Liberal party's efforts on Facebook and YouTube look almost quaint by comparison.

More observations follow after the chart:

Site or tool	Conservative	Liberal	NDP	Green
Facebook (# of supporters)	13,014	12,511	14,620	2,555
Flickr	Yes		Yes
Friendfeed	Yes
MySpace (# of friends)	Yes (24)
RSS feeds	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Twitter (# of followers)	Yes (452)		Yes (439)*
YouTube (# of videos)	Yes (16)	Yes (29)	Yes (34)

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* Bonus marks for NDP: They have a separate Twitter feed (56 followers) en francais.
Note: Numbers quoted above are as of Sept. 10, 2008 @ 9 p.m.

FACEBOOK FAVOUR: As you can see in the chart, NDP Jack Layton is the most popular Canadian politician in terms of Facebook supporters at 14,620 - that puts him just behind Ted Kennedy and just ahead of Al Franken in Facebook's list of politicians.

Stephen Harper is next, sandwiched between former Republican presidential candidates Rudy Giulianai and Fred Thompson; Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is not far behind (between Thompson and the late Lebanese politician Gebran Tueni) and Greens leader Elizabeth May checks in well back of the others (between Iowa Gov. Chet Culver and the late Chilean leader Salvador Allende).

FRIENDFEED: One other note. . . if you simply can't afford to miss a single party announcement but don't have the time to become a friend/follower/support . . . the Conservatives' Friendfeed page pulls together all of their social networking and online sharing feeds in one place.

THIS JUST IN.... An update to this post can be found here.