I thought I’d share a few of the things I talked about at the Labour Party Summer School this weekend.
It might seem strange us talking publicly about who we should be communicating with better and how we might try to do that. But if we don’t we’re fools, I reckon.
I suppose the main point to make is that Labour, like all political parties, must understand that it needs a better relationship with the voters of the future (Gen Y and the millenials) and why social media is such an important tool for doing that.
The relationship must be genuine and we should be making an effort to understand more the issues that really concern and matter to this generation in the digital age. Issues such as privacy, safety, censorship, ownership of information (piracy and copyright) creativity, quality of information. I’ll have more to say about this.
Here’s a few interesting facts.
- Gen Y were born between 1976 and 1991
- Currently there’s around 900,000 in NZ
- This year they will outnumber the baby boomers
- It is estimated that 96% of Gen Y use social media (world wide)
- The emerging generations are the largest ever.
- Combined X&Y = 70% global population
- In Australia 57% population
- Indonesia 67%
- Pakistan 75%
- Iraq 80%
- Gen Y = 2.1 billion worldwide
- In NZ, facebook use is at 1 million (25% population)
- 150% growth in the last year
- Global Nielsen report (March 09) says social networking has overtaken email as most popular way to communicate
- In NZ 79.6% pop uses the internet
- Amongst Maori, internet useage higher than non-Maori esp for social networking
- Every day, we are exposed to 1600 marketing messages. Most are filtered out
This You Tube clip called the Social Media Revolution is really interesting. We’re doing a lot of thinking about this. We take it seriously and want to be credible.
Red Alert is part of our attempt to develop a more genuine relationship with people online. Many Labour MPs have facebook pages and are starting to use them more regularly. A few are on Twitter. But it’s not enough. We’re got a few more ideas for direct engagement with a broad audience via a mixture of face to face and online means.
The younger audience is obviously critical, but all age groups are online and using social media.
Interested in your thoughts.
Trevor knows I can’t stand emoticons. I even did a post about it.
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2009/12/13/this-ones-for-spud/
Now I accept that I might be a bit full on in my adverse reaction to this stilted form of communciation (yellow smiley faces !!). I prefer to use actual expressions that express an individual feeling (such as Grrr). Trevor is provoking me. I’m wondering about giving him a warning. What do you think?
Trevor and Spud have something in common.
Don’t let Helen catch you using that James
Being provoked is your choice Clare
This time trevor beat spud to first post!!!
But having wound you up – your session was a highlight of a very stimulating 24 hours. It is good to have assumptions challenged. And lots of facts helped too.
@ Trev. I’m sure I have ways to make you pay. And if you’re going to use them, maybe you could widen your repertoire??
It’s a Che styled picture of her. It’s awesome. I’m keen to get it printed on a t-shirt with the words “Viva La Clark”.
Definitely agreed with Margaret Hayward when she said the Party’s survived because we’re able to keep the same values while also redefining them as people change. I reckon you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of what the next ‘redefinition of Labour’ has to be..
This is a very important topic, Clare, and some are only very slowly catching on. Here in Dunedin, the ODT does not have a FB page, but the NZ Herald does, and one can get updates on FB.
I regularly check how many people are using FB here in NZ, and as of today it is up to 1.3 million. 32.5% of the population. It has gone up by 100,000 since November. At 50,000 per month:
1/11/2011 2,450,000 or 61.25% of the NZ population
That many people probably don’t even watch TV! Compare the cost of a TV advertisement to the cost of getting a FB fan.
Say a TV ad costs $50,000 and it airs just one day. Someone can correct that amount. At 50c each per click, for $50,000 you can get 100,000 people to come to your fan page. If only 20% join, you got 20k fans who will get your updates every day, and you can send them messages for FREE. It isn’t spam because they opted in, and they can easily opt out. The TV ad is quickly forgotten unless you spend lots of money to continue playing it. There is at this point no TV interactivity.
Bang for the buck. FB is big bangs.
This is an example of how social media can sometimes be bad for people,especially National MP Maurice Williamson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwDSubqKT_k
FB pages, once known, explode like fireworks.
In mid October, U. of Auckland had a new FB page with 400 fans. Now, 3 months later they have 5,000 fans. Some major universities in NZ choose not to use social media at all, when the very top universities in the USA have FB pages.
Oxford: 20,711 fans
Harvard: 11,500 fans
Yale: 5,498 fans
Princeton: 10,086 fans
Stanford: 48,245 fans
Cornell: 13,894 fans
MIT: 6,039 fans
Chicago: 9,038 fans
The major NZ University I am referring to believes that Facebook pages doesn’t look professional and they don’t like the interaction with students.
I wonder why the universities above don’t seem to have those concerns. Surely schools like Oxford and Harvard would be careful not to tarnish their image.
It just takes some people longer to catch on. In a couple of years, when 80% of Kiwis are on FB, the idea of not engaging with this networking tool will seem ludicrous. It is just a waiting game.
Clare, Gen Y love emoticons, maybe YOU’RE the one who has to adapt? It’ll help form a better relationship with the voters of the future.
Ok, the smiley face here looks kinda evil!!
Social media can be used in a huge variety of ways. But the key to using it is getting people’s attention and waiting for them to come to you for info, rather than the other way around. Sometimes in politics there isn’t time to wait, so FB and other things like twitter are only ever going to be just a part of the solution for communicating. Any politician who thinks it replaces a knock on the door is kidding themselves, and while I don’t think for a minute Clare you would think that, some of your colleagues and opponents certainly do, in all likelihood. Just something to watch out for, IMHO.
Don’t give Trev a warning.
Of course it’s evil looking, this is a politcal blog.
I agree with you Mk.
@Jeremy – he’s done it at least twice before, he must be using his cyberbike.
@N, athan Mills LOL
Social media is a double edged sword, especially since there aren’t adequate laws to protect people.
Oxford is not in the USA.
Back to the point – the main point of this article as I see it is that the Labor party are talking about how to better communicate with Gen-Y.
Being part of that generation, I just have to say – they’ve done a terrible job of it thus far. During the by-election here in Mt Albert it became apparent just how much of a joke the electoral process really is. We had the choice of Russel Norman who’s whole policy seemed to revolve around putting muscle back into politics, Melissa Lee who was suffering foot in mouth disease and the Labor candidate who won by default (huge margin but very little of it had to do with communicating).
What happened to winning on policies? How about, instead of relying on social networking, some thought is given to communicating policies clearly? What I find really frustrating is the lack of any sort of simple pledge to represent those people in the constituent. This I see as much more fundamental – find a policy and stick to it and then communicate it…
I agree wholeheartedly with Nevyn’s post. I’m a Labour Party member who posted on the Grassroots Labour about Phil Goff’s ‘Nationhood’ speech. I found the speech offensive and sought to communicate with other Labour Party members especially MP’s. I was completely ignored. I even tried to contact MP’s via the personal message/ email function – still ignored. I have withdrawn my support and will not be renweing my membership because I feel that my issues are not important to the Labour Party. From my experience Labour is reluctant to communicate with its members through social media networking.
For those that belong to FaceBook I assume you read the erms and conditions… Did you read this one perchance?
“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”
Needless to say that I am not a member of FB.
Amongst Maori, internet useage higher than non-Maori esp for social networking
Really?
I was under the impression internet usage has a high correlation with income. Give that Maori income statistics trail behind Non-maori, this strikes me as counter-intuitive.
@Nevyn – I thought Shearer did a good job of talking about the issues.
And I really enjoyed the circus that was the Mt Albert by election. I think it would’ve been pretty boring without it.
@Patrick A – Yes FB is going to come back to bite millions. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s pretty bad to have universities tied to it. Students may be put in the position of having to be a part of it.
I didn’t join grassroots because of the ning terms and conditions. Email seems like a better way of getting in touch with Mps over sensitive issues than grassroots. Sensitive issues are better kept out of the public domain.
Here’s a concern of mine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy
These episodes are partly the result of the way people use Facebook, which has changed its service on several occasions in recent years. Each time the site brings more information into the public domain – and at each point it faces a series of protests and adverse reactions from users.
Moves included the decision in 2006 to introduce the “news feed” – an update of people’s activities that is now central to Facebook’s service. A year later it launched Beacon, a contentious advertising system that allowed advertisers to track your activities online. That eventually led to a $9.5m court settlement, but it did not prevent the company from bringing in new privacy changes in December that one campaign group called “plain ugly”.
Where will it end? It’s up to governments to protect its citizens.
“It is estimated that 96% of Gen Y use social media (world wide)”
Worldwide? So that includes Africa, India, and China? 96%? Citation please.
“Amongst Maori, internet useage higher than non-Maori esp for social networking”
Not according to the Digital Divide studies I’ve seen. Citation please.
On the subject of social media and sterling use of the interweb, this blog about the Nat Party’s own website linking to a fake Eric Roy site might be of interest… http://southernsquall.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/invercargill-mps-online-presence-hijacked-nats-own-website-in-embarrassing-link/
A lot of good stuff here. I’ll try to answer over the next few days.
@ Mike Dickison. I think the 96% is a US figure. See http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/ And that mnakes sense. High in lots of other countries. In China though, Q Zone is estimated to have at least 300 million subscribers.
The Maori use of the internet and social media figure came from a report titled Ministry for Culture and Heritage-
New Zealanders Use of Broadcasting and Related Media
http://www.mch.govt.nz/publications/media-use-survey/report.html
It says: “Maori respondents also use the Internet for a wider range of activities than non-M?ori, specifically for social networking (54 percent cf. 35 percent), downloading/streaming music and videos (48 percent cf. 37 percent), and playing games (33 percent cf. 25 percent).”
Am interested in any material you have.
@ Spud 11 Jan 3.32pm thanks. I was aware of this issue and am posting on it in the morning. Privacy of our information is a critical issue and we need public debate on it.
@ Nevyn 11 January 11.37am Thanks but disagree. Social media is a tool. A medium. It’s not an end. I think there’s a lot of policy discussion on Red Alert and more coming.
@ Patrick A 12.06pm. Don’t give up. This is what Red Alert is for. You are talking directly to us.
@ Mike Dickison
I would find it hard to believe that 20% of African Gen Y would be using social media networking.
@Clare, you’ve misinterpreted the research findings a bit.
## 1. You have to correct for age when making generalisations about Maori.
“Because M?ori have a younger age profile than the population at large, they…make extensive use of computers with Internet access.”
## 2. Even given their age profile, Maori don’t have as much internet access.
“Non-M?ori respondents were more likely than M?ori to own or have regular access to a computer with access to the Internet (86 percent cf. 78 percent)”
## 3. Maori who do have internet access are actually mostly using it for email, more so than Pakeha. Though they say they use it for more than just that (your quote above).
“M?ori and non-M?ori respondents _who owned or had regular access to a computer that could connect to the Internet_ were just as likely as each other to have ever done so for personal reasons and to have done so in the last two weeks . Despite this, M?ori were less likely than non-M?ori to have ever connected to the Internet for anything other than emailing (79 percent cf. 86 percent), or to have done so in the last two weeks (75 percent cf. 81 percent).”
I dug all that out of the report you’ve cited; thanks for the link, it’s very interesting.
I went back and looked up Oxford’s FB page after I wrote the other observations. Thought it would be good to include Oxford (UK), since Harvard and Oxford are right at the top.
The unnamed university celebrates when their top students get Rhodes scholarships and Fulbrights to these top universities. There is a bit of an inconsistency there. Why would they want that if those universities are sullying their reputations with base Facebook presences.
@Mike I haven’t misinterpeted. I have mentioned in passing that its interesting that the finding was that Maori more than non-Maori use the internet for a wider range of activities including social networking. Yes there are issues of access and digital literacy. I’d like to see more research on this and if there’s anything you can point me towards I’d be keen to see it.
I don’t think there’s enough work being done in this area.
@Clare, I interpreted
“Amongst Maori, internet useage higher than non-Maori”
to mean that Maori use the internet more than non-Maori. Your phrasing is a bit confusing. @Phil seems to have read it my way as well.
The Research NZ report is actually pretty good, and their data tables are more interesting than their general conclusions (see tables 30 and 33). The 40-54 age group are the ones contributing most to the wider range of different things Maori do online: they use the net for games, social networking, downloading, entertainment, and Skype more than the general population. It’s not young Maori driving this trend, though young Maori do Facebook a LOT more than young Pakeha.
Does Facebook have a FB Census page? They have more users than most countries have inhabitants. They should do an in-depth census and reveal that information.
I get my information from the ad tool on FB, and even that is very limited.
They have all kinds of data, just search Facebook on Facebook.
Andrew Straw’s comments are good.
[...] to see a similar one done here. And some discussion around what we could be doing better. As I’ve already said Labour can and should be using the technology of social media to communicate better with people. [...]
Over the last 6 months I have noticed an increase in politican’s of all political hues investing a lot of time and energy into their etheral social spaces .. I believe this is a sound strategy in long-term relationship and possibly consituency building. Clare, your research, will become even more significant as time goes on. I am not so sure that social media is going to allow for better communication styles necessarily. Rather, I feel, it may connect people more directly, without myriad filters watering down either the connection, signal strength, quality of feed – to one another, just as mobile phones (prior to text messaging) did before it. It is really important to realise that although several relationships can be created via these sites, it takes a great deal more energy and resourcing to nuture, nourish and enhance these relationships over the long-run
. I hope Labour, with talent such as Clare’s, invests more as time goes on.