Digital Campaigning with Kevin07 and Beyond

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party's digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - "Australia's first digital election", as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.

Kevin07 had some 2 million page views and some 400,000 unique visitors, and 14,000 "have your say" forms and 18,000 petitions were submitted. User-generated content was key here; most of the content of the on-site blog was drawn from user submissions. The videos had some 1.8 million views (and were cheap and effective); MySpace and Facebook had 24,000 and 20,000 friends and fans, respectively; the mobile Kevin07 site had 34,000 unique visitors; 40,000 T-shirts were sold; 1.2 million people were reached in marginal seats; and there were lots of "emails to Kevin". What was important here was to reward supporters and maximise viral impact (one-click canvassing), and to engage swinging voters - this latter, indeed, was especially crucial in this election, of course.

There was also huge coverage of the campaign offline (including significant exposure on The Chaser's War on Everything); Kevin07 itself was very well established as a brand. By contrast, the Liberal Party digital campaign was something of a trainwreck - the initial John Howard videos on YouTube were stale and ignorant of the site context, and campaign managers clearly were not even aware of the fact that comments on YouTube could be moderated (allowing for some very confronting comments attached to the first few postings). Overall, then, the digital campaign became symbolic of the major differences between Howard and Rudd.

Australian Labor showed a good deal of courage here in opening up channels of debate, with no more than an obscenity / insanity filter applied. "You have to take the rough with the smooth", Camilla suggests - but she also notes that this works better for campaigns out of opposition: it favours the new kid on the block (as it does with Barack Obama in the US, but also David Cameron in the UK). The range of comments and submission received ranged from the basic ("you rock!"), to real and deep engagement with topics, to mindless attacks ("go f**k yourselves!). Except for the latter, most of this material was published.

Camilla suggests that there is a clear style of videos in YouTube - a lower level of production values which makes the candidate more real and allows their personality to shine through. What's important here is also that the key group deciding elections are swinging voters, who do not consume much serious news and have a short attention span; video is very effective in reaching these voters, and can be utilised for viral marketing - but this can also be used against a politician, of course (see for example the vast range of YouTube videos poking fun at George W. Bush), and some such content is able to stop a campaign dead in its tracks. This is entirely unpredictable.

One challenge in a 24/7 campaign is to implement rapid damage limitation; disinformation is a real problem, here, and it is unclear whether the legal system helps deal with slander in time. Also, how can dialogue in one-to-one conversations with an entire nation be maintained? Perhaps forums provide one answer here. At the same time, online fundraising has emerged as a new resource for campaigning (as Obama has shown); automatic blog and community monitoring enables campaigners to go where the debate is happening; and contextual tools may be able to automate some of the one-to-one engagement. The main benefit of such digital campaigning is openness and freedom of expression - but at the same time, this is also its principal drawback.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, Kevin Rudd, Kevin07, Labor, digital campaigning, politics