Who you gunna call?

While the ultimate decision on who gets to govern Australia is still being made, the results are being measured on how digital / online activity had an impact on both Politicians and Voters.

There are of course many ‘hustings’ online that relevant candidates had to consider, each with its own merits and bad points, each with its own relevancy for different candidates.

Overall, the average political candidate in the Federal election was not focussed on their digital hustings and spent time  in their physical realms and little, if any in their digital realms.

Reviewing the Top Politicians page on www.mypolitician.com.au, after page 4 we find that many limited their online activity, with sites that had minor updates, reasonable Facebook usage but limited use of other online communication tools.

Interestingly though; our review of traffic sources, queries and information found that the overall voter was not spending their time looking for answers on social media in this election.

That is probably a little self fulfilling though in that due to the lack of information available from Members of Parliament and candidates in Social Media Channels  - voters went looking elsewhere.

While those in the Social Media stream would have everyone believe that it is the centre of the universe, the reality is something quite different. The noise definitely increased in volume considerably on Twitter, however the streams focussed on the election were clearly dominated by regular and repetitive participants, rather than a wide spread, country wide demographic.

Facebook, while with a much larger audience of potential voters in Australia, is not the easiest of locations to search through, and given the weird and wonderful inconsistencies in naming conventions used to identify candidate pages, they are very difficult to locate. Flickr, YouTube and others all played their part, but mostly the voter needed to have a point of reference to work from, and more often than not they were looking for a candidate’s web presence / property rather than a specific channel.

What is clear is how poorly managed each individual’s brand space is online. Traffic from websites was the highest traffic below ultimately Google.

70 per cent of all traffic was from search engines and second to that was referring sites, which did not include the popular social networks. Interestingly as well in the referring site area, some sites, that potentially are meant to have quite a large reach due to social media follower numbers had little impact. For example a post on Laurelpapworth.com generated less than 10 referrals, whereas traditional media sites across NSW generated 100’s and up to 1000’s of click throughs.

The main referring sites were traditional media, not only the sites such as couriermail.com.au and goldcoast.com.au that had embedded maps, but the SMH which wrote an article about political sites, and in which the site featured number 1.

The overall spike in traffic directly from Google with specific candidate and electorate related queries in the last 3-4 days of the campaign and phenomenally on election day at more than double any other day, was incredible. It highlights both that voters were still researching right up to the last minute, and also highlights clearly how much influence in providing information Google has for mainstream internet Australia.

Overall, the major lost opportunity for each candidate was how poorly they owned the results that were showing in Google for queries directly relating to themselves. In all instances the queries are very niche and granular, apart from some specific instances like Kevin Rudd, and could have easily been owned by them without major investments of money.

To some degree the insistence by many that they should only be focussed on the Social Media channels frightens off those who don’t have a good grasp of the internet in the first place.

Cameron Dick MP, State Attorney General and MP in Queensland, on the eve of the election, was concerned with “how activity online can be focused directly to my electorate”.

“Ultimately it is people in my electorate I am first concerned with being in contact with, and secondly people relating to my Ministerial post as Attorney General” – an issue which admittedly makes it harder for a minister over a back bencher or in Federal Parliament a Senator without a direct constituency.

In many ways Cameron is right. The issue for a politician, who isn’t one of the leaders of the parties, is not about being globally popular but how they can communicate with their electorate and how they can target, and manage conversations in their electorate.

A well managed simple site, run under an open source platform like WordPress, would enable them to maintain regular updates, control their first point of presence and additionally to feed their other digital channels. While this is a more static and / or broadcast platform, it is also an archive of their positions and policy views, a representation of what they stand for that lives long past the 6 week election cycle. Combined with different social tools, and a willingness to engage members of their electorate (and others) would open them up to be a more consultative and positive candidate.

Simple search management strategies would have ensured that such candidates would be found for both their own names and for anyone searching for that electorate. Simple but effective.

As it was mypolitician.com.au dominated many search queries after only 5 weeks of existence, and as one tweeter said “Hey @mypolitician get the ‘f’ out of my Google results”.  That in itself indicates how poorly represented individuals were.

Being successful on google?

A one page, centrally hosted site for each candidate is a poor example of how the major parties managed this, and many will disappear once the specific pages for this campaign are shut down, given their high connection to the leaders in both URL structures and branding. This is a terrible end result for search engines as the historical value of each page will be lost.

The Greens one page solution at least was focused and named around the electorate name, and consequently can be maintained an updated longer term to be search significant in the next election/s.

What is clear is that while social media is a significant player in some instances and has had an impact in highlighting key issues, such as the @wendy4senate issues and others, the key driver of information for the large majority of voters at present is Google.

It seems Search Engines and Optimisation for such isn’t dead just yet, although the impact of Social Signals is paramount in search results now (more on that later).

Well that’s what ireckon anyway!