Online activities of parties are checked

How does successful voter mobilization work in Web 2.0? In order to take into account the increasingly important role of the social media election campaign, the international communications agency Weber Shandwick is launching an “Election-on-the-Web Monitor”, which in 2009 reports on the activities of major parties such as the CDU / CSU, SPD, FDP, Bündnis 90 / The Greens and the Left are to be observed on the social web.

“There are worlds between the impressive Web 2.0 campaign by US President Barack Obama and the online activities of German politicians. Nevertheless, it is becoming apparent that parties and candidates will increasingly try to win voters over social media channels for the federal election, ”says Astrid von Rudloff, CEO of Weber Shandwick in Germany. The exciting question is to what extent the parties and their top candidates are actually involved in the Internet, which topics will spark discussions and whether their advocates can be mobilized significantly.

The election-on-the-web monitor, which will appear every two weeks until the federal election in September, is intended to collect trends and forecasts on the success of the parties in the Web 2.0 community using two criteria. For example, an “activity index” compares the web activity of the individual parties, their top candidates and advocates. A reliable indicator for the degree of social web activity is the cumulative “Social Media Score”, which shows changes compared to the last analysis and based on a zero measurement from January 2009. In addition, a “subject index” is intended to provide information on the topics currently most discussed in connection with the top candidates. Based on the number of individual commentators and their posts on blogs, forums, video and photo portals as well as micro-media offers, it is determined which politically relevant topics are actively being discussed on the social web and which politicians are getting the most attention with what. The top topics discussed most frequently during the survey period should be assigned to the top candidates and shown according to their positive, neutral or negative tonality.

www.webershandwick.de