The resource constraints on the political parties allied with the potential political downsides meant that the content was generally very bland.

One of the things that I noticed during the campaign was how little information that we linked to (at The Standard). What we did link to really wasn’t particularly well permalinked. There are a whole pile of broken links to sites related to the 08 election.

Hopefully Red Alert will be able to provide a better information source next election. But it is a good thing that you started so early learning how to communicate and moderate so early. It is a tricky business.

Political parties should focus on developing an e-Campaigning strategy rather than on available technology. For example, the majority of parties we interviewed believed that, had they been able to afford “state of the art” technologies, their e- Campaign would have been much better. However, several parties did not give much consideration to their e-Campaigning strategy or had difficulty articulating their strategy for e-Campaigning. Moreover, political parties tended to assign responsibilities for strategising and operating their e-Campaign to webmasters. Technologies should be seen as an enabler of e-Campaigning, rather than a driver. A good example is the Obama campaign in which the same technologies are applied compared to the New Zealand campaign but with different uses, outcomes and effects.

Analysis like that is kind of patronising and completely ignores the fact that NZ campaign teams are a handful of people usually covering all aspects of the campaign, not just online, whereas Obama invested millions into human resource for his online campaigning alone. It also ignores the fact that while Obama applied the same technologies, he applied them with the help of dozens of programmers knitting the technologies together to ensure that the front-end helped deliver back-end information that made it easier for the campaign to convert online engagement into real-world engagement (or at least into a pervasive online engagement).

I do think there is a great deal to be learnt from the Obama campaign, but it will be nice in a couple of elections time when there is a body of data around the evolution of New Zealand e-campaigning so we can get away from these comparisons with a campaign that has precious little equivalence with New Zealand’s political context.