Saturday 24 February 2007

The political e-marketing

In April, each French will have to choose a new president. There is already 35 candidates, but 6 of them will probably share 99% of the vote (S. Royal, N. Sarkozy, F. Bayrou, J-M. Le Pen, D. Voynet and A. Laguiller).
The French legislation is very strict about politic:
-Any news-man linked with a political party has to make a break during the campaign.
-The time of speaking of each candidate (or supportive people) in the medias is count and they have to be equal at the end.
-TV adds are forbidden
-Public notices are limited to specific areas, with the same space for each candidate.
-Companies support is forbiden (they can't provide funds to political partys).
-etc ....

But this time, the politics use a "new" media out of control.
For 2 years now, internet has fully entered in the communication plan of politicians.
The right party (UMP) started the "war" with:
  • -adds on google
  • -spams
  • -podcasts on blogs
Now, each party use these ways to present its program.
Some new tools measure the noise made by the political use of internet (Tendançologue for the RSS Flux, Politibuzz for the blogs and the Présidographe for the search engines).

The principal limits of the "e-campaign" is the emergence of videos published without approval and control on Youtube or Dailymotion detracting some candidate.

Even if nobody knows the exact list of the candidates, the campaign is already virulent on internet and would become more and more important in the next months. It is impossible to assure this media will have an important role in the choice of the internet users, we will have the answer on May 6th.

3 comments:

Víctor Cegarra said...

It's a very interesting topic. In fact, it happened the same some months ago in Catalonian elections (in Spain). Some of the parties used youtube to show some videos.

However, I think that's just the tip of the iceberg; this situation shows us an important underlying question: have we seen the threats of new Internet interactive tools or just the opportunities? Do we have to start legislating and regulating blogs, for example? Do enterprises mislead viral marketing with poisoned practices?

We will see how judges and internet users face this situation in the next years.

Lan said...

That's a very interesting topics! It reminds me when Scott (our guest speaker) talkes about Dean's sucess in mobilizing people using Internet. I guess it is a really effective political tool.

By the way, your English is good :)

Tof said...

It takes me some hours to post few lines, I correct it again and again to makes as few mistakes as possible :)