Political engagement using Twitter. Some thoughts from the Greek elections

Kostas Karamanlis – current Greek Prime Minister
Uploaded by Νέα Δημοκρατία on 26 Sep 09, 10.19AM GMT.

It’s time for the Greek elections (again – they seem to happen more and more often) and I am watching with more interest than it can possibly be good for me.

As always my interest revolves around political communications (public affairs will do that to you) and I have been watching digital communications attempts by the Greek political parties especially closely. Not to mention that I can’t vote (you can’t vote for Greek national election from abroad).

I will leave PASOK (Greek Socialist Party, currently the opposition) aside for now, I’ve mentioned before that in terms of online engagement and digital communications they have a well thought out strategy and seem to be innovating every day.

The current government party, ND (Nea Dimokratia/ New Democracy) has been lagging behind for quite some time in terms of online communications and engagement for quite some time with the possible exception of some of their most prominent members like the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dora Bakoyanni.

It seems that the upcoming election has nudged ND out of its traditional comms position and onto some engagement projects. The most talked about in the Greek blogsphere these days is what the party calls LIVE with the President, which quickly became known as #askND, due to the Twitter hashtag they have asked people to use when they are submitting questions to their Party Leader (usually called President in Greece) and current Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis (pictured).

The process is quite clear. Users can submit any number of questions they like via Twitter using the relevant hashtag. These questions will then go on to the ND blog and a voting process will begin. Kostas Karamanlis will answer the 10 most popular ones via “LIVE streaming video” (capitalisation theirs – as if answering live to a set of pre-set questions is some sort of an achievement which – duh – it’s not!).

As you can imagine all hell broke loose. Sure there were a lot of questions but let’s look into some worrying trends for a bit.

• Some questions were serious and legitimate
• More questions were a bit on the humorous side (well, quite a lot)
• Some questions (and here is the fun part) came from Twitter users with 0 friends and 0 followers

And here lies the problem. By seeing quite a large number of questions submitted by newbies on Twitter the Greek Twitter community started asking uncomfortable questions. Who are these people? Are the questions planted? How can we trust the process? How can we know for sure that the voting will be honest? (nikan visualised some of these – blog post in Greek)

New users posing questions is obviously quite legitimate. They might have seen the project on ND’s website and decided to start a Twitter account in order to participate – nothing wrong with that.

Leaving the Greek love of conspiracy theories aside, the problem is with how ND is actually running the process.

There is nobody to answer concerns
See, if PASOK had done the same and the same questions were raised they have a team of quite recognisable people (let’s call them Community Engagement Managers even though it’s an inaccurate term for what they do) who would step in and answer any concerns. The PASOK people would have been largely believed because they have been present for years and they have built up their credibility. There is nobody from ND doing the same and even if they did they are an unknown quantity – why should the community believe them?

Last minute engagement counts for very little
It’s a bit worrying that ND jumped onto the online engagement bandwagon so late in the day. It looks as if an election simply forced them to talk to people. Not cool with hardcore Twitter users and bloggers (and in Greece the majority is hardcore)

Discuss the process – be there
It’s a lovely idea and hats off to them for organising it but they are underselling it massively by not actually being there to fight for it. It’s too late for them to build credibility now but something could have been done if they nominated one of their comms people to handle this campaign and defend it to the online world.

If you’re doing it for traditional media exposure you’ve won
It all depends of course. This kind of project can be marvellous for getting you some exposure into traditional Greek media who might not understand the subtleties of online engagement. A tv news report into the wonderful project by ND will actually communicate an air of ‘we are here for the voter – we are listening to your problems’ instantly. So from that perspective I would count this as a short – term win.

The point of course is there is nobody to ask about all this.

Such a shame.

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Following a database meltdown (long live the server move processes) this post and the comments were uploaded again manually.