Pinnacle Insights
European Parliament election drive breaks new ground in online political comms
June 12, 2009 | Written by Will Hardie
“Swing low, swing right” is The Economist’s take on last week’s European elections, and these are certainly the big themes for a lot of the media coverage: a record low turnout (43%) and a rebalancing of power towards the centre-right.
But behind the scenes and in the ether, something much more interesting has been going on — at least for communications nerds like me.
Quite distinct from the political campaigning, the Parliament itself ran a ground-breaking online social media campaign aimed at using new online channels to raise awareness of the elections and engage voters.
European Parliament comms chief Stephen Clark gave us a little background yesterday in this discussion comment on the Pinnacle Training Alumni LinkedIn group:
This has been a rather countercultural exercise for us (no-one else yet identified in the institutional peer group doing this), but in my view a very necessary one. It was possible in the context of a campaign promoting awareness of the European elections thanks to a widespread sense of a need to explore new avenues of communication among the political classes and, yes, the inspiration (not exactly the example) provided by the Obama campaign.
The campaign is over. It is time to analyse the experience and to consider how these techniques can be used in communicating the day-to-day business of the Parliament.
The links to our various online platforms are here: http://tiny.cc/b1WRu
A blog post on the subject written a few weeks ago is here: http://tiny.cc/vyqcr
Posted by Stephen Clark
Check it out. It’s all very slick and clever, spread across eight platforms:
- European Parliament website
- Special elections website
- EuroparlTV
- Facebook page
- MySpace Profile
- YouTube channel
- Flickr
- Twitter feed (which, incidentally, was the channel that drew my attention to this campaign).
