more findings: blogging

Trying my best to write a blog myself, I should be careful what I say about politicians’ blogs (My excuse is that I am really just writing for myself, to summarise my thoughts). There are big differences between the politicians who “get” blogging and those who don’t. Some, such as Audun Lysbakken and Sondre Olsen, are excellent writers, who manages to turn boring political issues into interesting reading (They almost turned me over to their political side, even though I’ve never voted for any of their parties). Others are not as good, and their blogs reads more like a long list of rejected newspaper debate clippings than as blogs, with their lack of links, impersonal language and recaps of what you’ve already read a thousand times before in political pamphlets.

The Minister for Health and social affairs, Bjarne Håkon hanssen, has done an interesting experiment. He used his health blog to ask readers for comments on a health reform that is being discussed now in April. Readers responded well, and there are hundreds of stories from people who give detailed information about their own encounters with the Norwergian health system and suggestions for improvement. I guess people love to talk about their health anyway, so this was a good idea. I am lookuing forward to see more blogs requesting comments on reforms and planned legislation.

 

Done researching political parties on Facebook

I’m finally done with my examination of political parties Facebook use, and my initial optimism based on the interviews has somewhat dwindled.  The official pages and groups have little activity. Some users post questions, some try to start discussions, but there is little evidence that politicans are replying. When they do, it is often with the same standard political answer you’ve heard a thousand times before. There are exceptions, though, and I think that with a little more effort, and a little more training in how to present your message in social media, things would improve.

Jens Stoltenberg and Siv Jensen, leaders of the two biggest parties, are a bit more active than the others, and there is a lot of discussion going on among users. Høyre is asking for voter input in policy creation, and several of the parties have started groups for or against different issues. Venstre and Senterpartiet mostly use their groups and pages to publish notes with links to news on their own web pages, which of course means that there is little user acitivty and dialogue going on.

My preliminary conclusion is that most of them are trying, some are succeding in some areas, but that all of them still have a long way to go if they want to grab voter support from Facebook.

 

Finished with interviews and exam

Finished my interviews two weeks ago, but haven’t had time to look at them until now, because of an exam in e-collaboration (which I think went fairly well BTW). I still haven’t done a thorough analysis, but I have transcribed all the interviews (a good candidate for most boring job ever), and have some initial findings. Compared to the last election, it seems as if the political parties have a better grasp of what they need to do in order to suceed with social media use. This year, politicians are actually eager to participate and debate, something which definitely was not the case in the local election two years ago. Everyone I talked to had high hopes for social media, and some of them mentioned successful Facebook campaigns that have been picked up by the media (without anyone knowing the party was behind the campaign).

What strikes me as most interesting is that they all seem to agree on just about everything. Everyone wants dialogue, everyone are using the same social media applications (more or less), and everyone mentions content quality and communication adapted to the particular medium as important. it seems that both participants and technologies have matured since the last election. If fine words translates to effective use of social media still remains to be seen though.