Social Media in Political Practice

[Ryan Lejbak]

Presentation by Wayne Chu, the new media director at the Saskatchewan Liberal Party

New media campaigns are no longer "new media campaigns." The Liberal party has developed a unified communications strategy, so brochures, billboards and TV all come together with the web, YouTube, Facebook, etc. By bringing new media people into the "upper echelons" of the party, new technologies can better communicate the messages. Many campaigns in the past have not worked like this.

What have they done? Most political sites are brochures, news releases and issues. This is the old way. The new way is to integrate social media into the political sites. The Sask Liberals are posting everything on social media platforms like YouTube where they can reach a larger market. This will allow people to post comments and ask questions, which is, for traditionalists, risky. But the Liberals are embracing this as it will allow them to answer questions.

Another new idea is to allow people to produce their own TV and radio commercials for the party. The party will then hold a vote and then put the winning ads on TV and radio. This is a crowd sourcing philosophy that is working out really well.

People no longer get all of their info from TV, radio and newspapers. People are now consuming the information that they want. So narrowcasting and the web are becoming increasingly important.

Fundraising on the internet is becoming more important. Political parties realize that they can make a lot of money from a bunch of $10 and $20 donations. This was hard to do in the past.

There was lots of talk about how to make it easier for people to find out info and see debates. One idea is to get the feed from the networks debates and allow the leaders to put it on their site. This would allow people who can't watch it on network time to watch when they have time on their own.

They are currently trying to get as many of their candidates as possible to form Facebook groups to help get the message out. This will also help them get more volunteers.

I hope I captured this session properly... please feel free to ad more or provide comments below!