Social media is transforming election campaigns as voters migrate increasingly to mobile phones, social media experts told delegates to the Manning Centre Conference over the weekend.
The migration to mobile, combined with moves like the CRTC’s ruling forcing cable companies to offer a “skinny basic” package, is raising questions about the value of traditional television ad buys for candidates and political parties.
Meanwhile, new technologies such as Facebook live streaming, 360-degree video and virtual reality and campaign tools like Nation Builder that can increasingly synch information on supporters from different sources, are allowing campaigns to reach Canadians and micro target their messages to an unprecedented extent.
“Traditional campaigns in the sense that George W. Bush ran in 2000 and 2004, those are dying or dead in the United States,” American social media expert Vincent Harris told the conference. “They’re dying or dead. And they are dying or dead across a bunch of different countries too.”
“A well-run campaign of today and of the future is focused on short, snackable mobile content. It is focused on livestreaming video. It is focused on digital rapid response. It’s focused on authenticity. It is focused on being entertaining.”
In interviews with iPolitics, experts say the shift was apparent in Canada’s last election. While social media companies worked with all the major parties, they say the Liberals adopted social media more aggressively and weren’t as afraid to take chances and be creative with the way they used them.
“I think the Liberals understood very early on that they wanted to be social and they wanted to tap into that market so they actually put resources into it and they treated it very seriously,” Steve Ladurantaye, head of Canadian news and government partnerships for Twitter, said in an interview.
“The Conservatives were very conservative. They kind of stuck to message…The NDP were somewhere in the middle but they didn’t really approach it as aggressively as the Liberals did.”
For example, on the days Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was in a leaders’ debate, the Liberals bought the top slot in Twitter’s promoted trends, Ladurantaye explained.
“The promoted trends was a pretty savvy move that got them a lot of eyeballs.”
“They bought those on debate days. So that means you’re at the top of that trend stream…So anybody who clicked on that would get their information that day.”
In some cases, Canada’s election also proved to be a testing ground for new technology that companies like Twitter now plan to deploy in the upcoming U.S. election.
“A lot of the stuff we did in the Canadian election, we’re now using in the U.S,” he explained.
“Like with the debates, trying to get tweets on screen that surface during the debate so you can serve them up to candidates as it’s happening was something we did here first. Live tweeting debates. All that stuff is something that we tried in Canada and now we’re pushing out more aggressively there.”
Katie Harbath, politics and government outreach director at Facebook, says there was a big shift to mobile phones between 2011 and the last election.
“Mobile was huge. In 2011, we were just starting our shift from desktop to mobile. This time, so much of the activity was on mobile. Mobile ads. Mobile video. I think video was still very huge. Live video at the end but video throughout was a huge component of this campaign and video that was again watched on the phone – not necessarily just what was happening on TV.”
Live video streaming became available in August during the election campaign and the Liberals used it so effectively that Harbath says it’s one of the examples she uses in presentations around the world.
“I would say that the live video at the end was something that allowed Trudeau and theLiberals — when they announced their platform — allowed them to reach a lot more people than were just there in the room. He started it backstage. Then he brought them out. It’s an example that I use elsewhere around the world to show people how they could use live.”
Much of the campaigning the parties were doing wouldn’t have been visible to Canadians – unless they were in a group a party was targeting.
“There was a lot of stuff happening underneath the surface and a lot of people that they were talking to,” Harbath explained. “What matters to a 25-year-old in Toronto is different than what matters to a 60-year-old in Vancouver.”
Harbath says the Conservatives tended to invest in Facebook early in the campaign while the Liberals focused on the latter part of the election.
“Content-wise, Stephen Harper was doing Q & A’s, they were doing a lot. Towards the end, I think they got a lot more comfortable in terms of the social media they were doing.”
“Trudeau’s team, which I found interesting – they were taking something like his hair and people talking about how he had great hair, and they were incorporating it into content that they were building for the Facebook page. So rather than running away from it, they were really embracing it.”
Tools like Facebook’s Pixel allowed parties to target prospective voters who had visited their websites with Facebook ads. Parties were also able to direct particular advertisements to lists of people they had identified and advertise to “lookalike” audiences of people who had similar characteristics or likes as people they had identified as supporters.
“We really saw all the campaigns using Facebook for engaging with voters, sharing their messages and also using paid advertising to make sure that they were reaching the voters that they wanted to,” Harbath said, pointing out that 7 million Canadians participated in 50 million interactions on Facebook about the election.
“We really are the new town hall.”
Peter Wrinch, Nation Builder’s director of politics and advocacy for Canada and the Pacific, says his company worked with individual candidates from all political parties, many of whom got elected.
“I think that the role that Nation Builder played in the federal election was that a lot of candidates – and this is very typical for our business – a lot of candidates recognized the power of Nation Builder where the central parties, generally speaking…have their own proprietary system that they have either invested in over many years, built themselves or have contractors to work with.”
Nation Builder helps candidates or groups manage and attract supporters. For example, once a potential supporter supplies their e-mail address, Nation Builder can cross match it with various social media accounts to allow a campaign or an interest group to better target them.
One MP who used Nation Builder successfully during the campaign was NDP MP Kennedy Stewart, who won his riding of Burnaby South by 1.2 percentage points.
“He signed up for Nation Builder a year before the writ dropped, he worked very hard in his riding, he raised tons of money on Nation Builder so that he was very prepared for the election,” said Wrinch.
“He trained his full team on how to use Nation Builder. Invested in that training. I think they ran some practice E-days. They worked with our team to really leverage the software, to really ask those hard questions outside of the heat of a campaign.”
While Wrinch says the candidates who used Nation Builder attracted more volunteers and more donations, national parties aren’t yet on board.
“I think what the debate really is that the central parties are acting as gatekeepers to the toolset – not necessarily the data – but to the toolset,” Wrinch said. “They do control the data as well. What they are saying is we need people to knock on doors and do phone calls. We don’t want them sending e-mails and synching social media and doing all those things.”
“But what we’re seeing is that candidates want to do all that – particularly savvy candidates.”