2010: The Cyberspace Strategy

Written on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 9:00 pm | by The Jester-in-Exile

Via Aileen’s work blog, I downloaded the Social Media Tracker Wave.3 study by Universal McCann, and after digesting its results, I thought of how this would impact the political landscape come the 2010 elections.

Of course, I did have to take the numbers provided in the study with a grain of salt (especially since I am not certain if the Philippine numbers did include our compatriots overseas), but the trends do provide interesting insights that just might influence the thinking of political strategists.

See, despite the relatively low internet penetration in the Philippines, I am certain that cyberspace will be one of the battlegrounds for the hearts and minds of the Philippine electorate.

Let’s see what we can glean from the study, shall we? Let’s dedicate this post to political strategists for 2010 candidates.

First, let’s get some of the numbers from the study. Do note that the study, as far as I can tell, uses these assumptions:

- The study will look only at the behavior of “active internet users” (those who use the internet every day or every other day).

- The age demographic of the population of internet users being looked at is between 16 to 54 years old (which means some of the respondents are not yet qualified to vote).

- Numbers (”market data”) are from TGI, Simmons or their equivalent, and these were correlated with Internet World Stats, CIA World Factbook and Comscore.

With these assumptions and correlations, these were the findings:

- The Philippines has 15.4% internet penetration of the total population, with 3.7M active internet users. Again, it must be said that these may not include the internet penetration of our expats and OFWs, who quite likely go online as a means of communicating with the folks at home.

- Of the Philippines’ active users, 90% of active users read blogs/ websites, and 65% of active users have started blogging.

- 83% of the Philippines’s active users use social networking sites, with a whopping 89% of these users on Friendster. Photosharing remains the major use of such sites, with 86% of social network subscribers sharing their photos, with 60% of these users using their sites to share videos as well.

- The number shouldn’t be surprising, but almost every single active user (99% of active users) in the Philippines watches YouTube. On the other hand, podcasting cannot yet be counted out, with 62% of active user has downloaded a podcast.

- Nearly half of active internet users seem to want high volumes of information made available to them, with 45% of active internet users using RSS.

With these numbers, let me try to posit some of the things that political strategists should probably keep in mind.

Connect or Perish

In the battle for hearts and minds in cyberspace, the first front must be that of social networking sites. To my way of thinking, this is one of the reasons why Senator Antonio Trillanes IV was able to get a significant edge over the candidates he beat, what with Sonny’s Friendster pages.

The first recommendation, therefore: at the very least, set up a Friendster site and blurb yourself; spread your mug via your supporters and invite as many people to be your “friends”.

The second front would be that of the blogosphere; either set up a blog for your politician boss and make him populate it, or blog for his benefit (like say, “mylifewithchiz.com” or something). Now, here’s the thing — if your content is by and large repeats of press releases or news reports, you won’t be able to get a large following; by blogging about “personal matters”, your content will quite likely go viral (note that the vast majority of the Philippine blogosphere are “personal” blogs).

Recommendation number two, then: be not afraid of the blog and start posting, with recommendation number two-dash-A, which is learn from Barack Obama’s example and get on Twitter. Recommendation two-dash-B would be to make your blog or website RSS friendly, so that you can increase the size of your audience; recommendation two-dash-C would be to subscribe to your opponents’ feeds, so that you can keep an eye on them… and perhaps write posts to demolish their arguments (don’t forget to link back so that we can take a look at your opponents’ posts too and be thereby amazed at the strength of your position).

The third front would be to generate downloadable content, by which I mean videos on YouTube, photos, and podcasts (yep, in that order; note that video clips are the fastest growing platform). Upload your political ads and stuff like that; make sure that if you are interviewed by the networks, you have a staff flunky taking the same video (note that networks generally edit so that you only take 15 seconds of airtime). Upload the ten-minute video on YouTube so that viewers get to download and take around with them on their iPods. Upload photos on your blog or website of you speaking on the Senate floor, arguing in front of the en banc Supreme Court, or whatever, and upload the mp3 recording of your speech for people to download.

Recommendation number three would then be this: Upload content so that users can download them and take around, listen to them, and share with friends.

Obviously, the internet cannot yet replace radio and TV as the primary media for image building, but a strong cyberspace presence will doubtless put a candidate up close and personal with the online-capable electorate. I’m thinking that a candidate who successfully goes viral will quite likely gain at least a million votes, easy.

Moving on, let’s talk about how a political strategist can convince his boss, the crusty old politician, why he should risk going online.

Plug and Play
Your boss will likely be leery to go online because his website could very well be a nest for his detractors, but then again, he’d be right.

That said, tell him this — the more flamers he gets, the more visibility he gets on a Google Search, and the more visible he is, the better. Tell him that getting visibility is the first step to getting the cyberspace vote.

The next thing to tell him would be to quote this result of the study: “36% think more positively about companies that have blogs”. That said, tell him that being brave enough to go online would very well earn the grudging admiration of hardcore detractors, and would give his supporters’ niche in the blogosphere a rally point for them to start going viral for him.

The third thing to tell him would be to quote another result of the study: “34% of active internet users post opinions about products and brands on their blog”. With that, tell him that if he decides to actively engage his supporters in conversation and his detractors in debate on the online milieu, he could just be among the top searches on Google and Wikipedia, and with that a greater influence on students (who comprise a large slice of the potential voter pie), on OFWs (who collectively have the money to make or break political campaigns), and mainstream media (who will definitely scrape from the blogosphere because of the ease of use).

Tell your boss, in summary, that if he does not plant his flag in the blogosphere, he will lose his seat to some young upstart.

A caveat: you will not be convincing if the vast majority of the constituency your boss supposedly represents do not belong to the 3.7M online Pinoys.

But let’s talk about the political niche of the blogosphere itself — what does the study imply for 2010?

Racing The Red Queen

I’m guessing that popular pundits in the blogosphere will start exploring politicasting (okay, okay, I made that up — what I mean is that pundits will start vlogging and podcasting about their views and issues), and thus carving their own path as the “talking heads” of Generation Next. What will make this even more likely is that Generation Next — based on personal observation — wants their opinions heard, whether it be of support or counter-argument, and since cyberspace is the interactive medium that mainstream media is not, the younger voters will quite likely depend more and more on these online talking heads than, say, ANC (with the possible exception of The Explainer’s blogger and Ricky Carandang Reporting).

Online debates (in the form of blogs and bloggers duking it out with their posts and comments) will get even more fierce, especially with the capability to go at it without time and length limitations. If politicians decide to cash in on the blogging phenomenon, they will be able to gain a direct, extrapolatable measure of public support (and thus react and modify their strategies in almost real-time).

Mainstream media (if they decide to get their heads out of the sand) will have more valuable backstory and information readily available through Google searches instead of providing ten-second soundbites that really don’t provide much in the way of data towards making informed choices (yes, friends, MSM will increase the rate of their scraping). Mainstream media will quite likely picks up on the more fiery debates and the more viral punditry; with that, AM radio and on cable TV news channels will perform the offline viral work for them by themselves giving their two cents on them.

As a techie, I’m looking forward to watching the 2010 intramurals from the technological perspective, and admittedly this post is merely skimming the possibilities. This much I will say, however: cyberspace has yet to exercise direct and palpable influence on Philippine politics.

Key operative word: YET.

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About The Author: The Jester-in-Exile is an engineer by training and profession turned law student, and he writes of the Philippines because of his love for it. He blogs at The Journal of The Jester-in-Exile, and can often be found daydreaming about giving Robespierre haircuts to corrupt officials.

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Comments

2 Responses to “2010: The Cyberspace Strategy”

  1. mabini on May 17th, 2008 10:06 am

    Jester, that’s a good idea for media consultants and promoters of politicians running for national posts. They might bite your idea as it will be another money venture and capturing votes of Filipino voters come 2010 national elections.

    But i have high regard of the bloggers and internet users in our country.

    The possible problem here would be the volume of garbage and lies that the politicial promoters to promote their candidates-clients would throw in the internet media. We should be wary and critical of this situation to happen; otherwise we are throwing our voters to these opportunistic politicos and trapos - a bleak future for our country.

    As experienced bloggers and like you as responsible writers, we should a proactive role of making sure that garbage thrown in the internet by the politicos are immediately incinerated or shall boomerang to them. We need to set up a lighthouse and guard house here when they throw such stuff. The key role that shall be played by the internet should be to further educate and enlighten all the Filipino voters and non-voters to build our country from the rubbles of so many crisis perpetuated by never ending corruption, incompetence and lies. …even it will take a number of years to reach such goal - betterment for all Filipinos — lets go for it.

  2. The Jester-in-Exile on May 18th, 2008 6:04 pm

    on the spirit of your argument, mabini, i’ve this take: technology is neutral. how people use it will be up to them.

    think of atomic energy — one could either turn it into a source of useful power or a horrifying weapon of mass destruction.

    same thing with blogging and cyberspace. the milieu could be used to start useful debate and discussion or to spread orwellian propaganda.

    that said, i’m glad that bloggers by and large have decided to go the route of critical thinking, ahead of spinmeisters. better SERPS and SEO for those who’ve gone first, and it’ll take time before the local political operators can swamp the local political niche of the blogosphere.

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