Why Election 41 is Not Canada's Social Media Election... Sorta Tuesday April 26, 2011

Earlier this month, I made a pretty bold statement that I didn’t believe Election 41 would be a won by a Social Media Movement. And while I still stand by that prediction, I’m going to clarify this statement… just a wee-bit.

If you’ve been following the election rhetoric, you’ll notice that there are two social media movements which seam to be making waves in this election. Unfortunately, for the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Greens and the Bloc, neither one of these campaigns is being spear-headed by a specific political party.

Yes, a case could be made that the NDP is making some waves online, but in my opinion I don’t think their unimaginable surge is tied to a specific online social media campaign. The Liberals viral attempts with Ignatieff’s Rise Up speech and the Facebook Creeper haven’t generated any traction. While it doesn’t seam like the Conservatives have really been able to harness the power of social media to really create a buzz or even energize the audience that exists on those networks. The Greens and the Bloc, well I maybe missing something, but overall they aren’t really in the online conversation.

So What’s Happening Online

If anything, I can reinforce my original statement that the Social Media campaigns being organized by the major political parties aren’t clicking with the online audiences. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a few reasons for that.

Yet … we are seeing two independent movements, with completely different motives, which are starting to change the conversation and may ultimately effect final week of the campaign.

Do you know what those campaigns are?

In my opinion, they are Rick Mercer’s Vote Mob call to arms and Sh!tHarperDid.com.

The Rick Mercer Vote Mob Campaign

This movement was kick started by a rant on The Rick Mercer Report, in which Rick challenged the youth of Canada to show politicians that they aren’t just an apathetic demographic.

It was the earlier of the two campaigns, but it seams to have caught some decent steam. A quick search on YouTube shows dozens of Vote Mob’s being organized at each major university to encourage students to vote. These grassroots vote mobs are generating enough of a buzz for mainstream media to take notice.

So will the Vote Mobs movement create encourage an influx of Canada’s youth to get out and vote? We won’t really know until May 3rd, when the statisticians are done their work, but without question Mercer’s call to arms is creating a buzz and getting the attention of students – even if some politicians don’t like it.

I don’t have enough of a understanding of campus culture around the country to understand what these mobs might do in terms of numbers. (Remember I went to the U of C, a notoriously apathetic commuter university without a strong on-campus culture. These mobs could really change the culture on some major campuses like Queens, Guelph, UBC, etc.,) But if there is anything that the overal online conversation is noting, is that this all to arms is getting students to involved. And a stronger youth vote will definitely have an influence on election day.

Sh!tHarperDid.com

Which brings me to the big one. Yes, Sh!tHarperDid.com.

Regardless of your age or demographic, if you haven’t heard of SHD.com I have to question which rock you’ve been living under.

It has been retweeted and linked on facebook thousands of times. A quick look at the online conversation over the past two weeks, shows SHD as one of the biggest online stories of this campaign. (Subsequently, overshadowing the social media release of all the major parties)

With it’s vulgar tag line and crew of trendy hipsters, SHD.com asks the view to look at a laundry list of Harper’s deeds. Even with the cute sketch of Harper’s infamous kitten photo, it is a pretty rough attack at Harper.

While many will say it’s nothing more than a few angry artists taking pot shots at the less than cool Conservative Party, I think SHD.com has probably done more to shape the election conversation than any social media campaign. If you look at the trajectory of the entire campaign, SHD.com was the first major volley in the personal vilification of Stephen Harper. Yes, there were underpinnings of anti-Conservative and anti-Liberal slanders, but it was overwhelmingly on party policy.

A quick glance at the overall twitter conversation, and it’s clearly migrated from a question between a Conservative majority or a Conservative Minority to one of a Conservative Majority or the removal of Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. In fact, I gander to say that more then ever in this campaign, the rhetoric has shifted towards a personal attack on Harper. Which is an incredibly interesting turn of events and one that I think stems from the introduction of SHD.com into the conversation, which for many people has made it cool to hate on Harper.

Again, What Does This All Mean

If I knew, I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post.

But what I can say is that the conversation online is changing and it’s not being controlled by Canada’s political parties. Rather this post goes to show that neither party is winning the Social Media battle in this campaign. Instead, that the conversation is being influenced heavily by outsiders with completely different motives.

I’m leaning on these two campaigns in this post, because I think they show the positive and negative sides of Social Media movements. On the one hand you have Rick Mercer and impromptu-version of the Rock the Vote campaign. Then on other you have the hipster attack at Prime Minister Harper and his current record. Two completely different campaigns, but both creating buzz and bending the online conversations in ways which the major political parties only wish they could.

Categories: , , The Canada Vibe, The Soapbox

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