Matthew Ricketson has an article in The Age today about Howard’s use of online media for political campaigning, focussing on his YouTube announcement yesterday. I’m quoted in it, and I also made the point when talking to him that I saw Howard as using YouTube as a media play to shift coverage in the MSM, rather than using the form for what it can do. (I’m not being critical here – in media interviews, you always say more than space and other requirements mean will make it into the story.) The release of the video drew attention to Howard’s Devonport announcement (criticism of which can be found at John Quiggin’s place) and created a media buzz beyond what it otherwise might have received. In particular, his remarks made on the video itself are fairly banal and standard fare for the PM, and in isolation wouldn’t have been highlighted nearly as much had the YouTube engagement angle not been available. His strategic use of YouTube is more about pitching his message for maximum impact, and incidentally refuting claims that he’s old and out of touch, than about using the medium itself for political communication. That seems to have been effective, as there’s a claim in Ricketson’s article which suggests that Howard is now trumping Rudd in the race for Myspace friends:
Mr Howard has recently put up a page on the online social networking site, MySpace. Soon after his climate change announcement, he had fewer than a dozen “friends”.
As of yesterday he had 12,762, which compares favourably with Mr Rudd’s 10,242 on his MySpace page.
This is in fact misleading. Howard’s “official” myspace still has only 9 friends, compared with 8 at the time I first accessed it and wrote about it in this post. The unofficial myspace Ricketson has had a look at has in fact been going since at least March 2006, as you can see from the oldest page of 48 pages of comments:
13 Mar 2006 3:46 AM
Hey Mr Johny Howard Sirhows the war in iraq and afganistan goin
heard from G Bush lately ?
So the suggestion that’s implicit in Ricketson’s piece that there’s been a huge build up of momentum among the “YouTube generation” in the few weeks since his first climate change announcement on YouTube isn’t right. I suspect Ricketson may have been on the receiving end of some Liberal Party spin.
Update: As pointed out in comments by Captain Oats, the Howard myspace page with all the friends is in fact anti-Howard satire, as you can tell from the blog entries. So if the 12762 friends proves anything at all, it proves that there are at least 12762 people keen to take the mickey out of Howard.
Thanks to Daniel Robertson for his headsup via the LP Facebook group on the myspace confusion.
i thought that a lot of the action on myspace was peeps seeking out “benefits” from like-minded myspacers – but the thought of sex with the PM conjures up images way too horrific for words
(i bet he keeps his socks on)
It’s not “misleading”. It’s a fucking huge cock-up!
Read the first blog posting in the “unofficial” myspace profile…
Yikes!
I’ve updated the post accordingly.
Reading some of those comments gave me a good laugh. Just goes to show that even journalist cant be bothered reading what pollies have to say on their sites let alone the general public.
My pleasure …
IMO, it’s just plain wrong that the press is so routinely cavalier with the facts.
Is this the Fourth Estate, or a Fifth Column?
what is particularly dissapaointing is that this from a guy who, in his capacity as media and communications editor for that paper, bangs on that “the conventions of mainstream daily journalism, would strive to be an accurate, fair and, as far as is possible, objective report”.
Yeh, right.
Reminds me of a joke:
At a linguistics conference, the boffin is opining:
“In some languages, the use of a double negative functions as an affirmative.
In some languages, a double negative reinforces denial.
In no language culture does a double affirmative function as a denial.”
From the back of the room is heard a drawl: ” Yeh, right”
Its a pretty sad day when the number of friends you can accumulate on myspace or other social network sites is used as a measure of popularity. Whats next? Looking into the lives of these “friends” to see what type of people these politicans are willing to associate themselves with?
Sent that lingustics joke to my linguist Mum. Had me in stitches. But maybe that’s just me…
To the point, though.
Mark, not sure if this is part and parcel of your point that Howard is using YouTube more to shift coverage in the MSM than for its form, but I see it as a clever way of making an announcement absolutely free of opportunities for critical evaluation.
He doesn’t care what the YouTube comments or video replies say. He is simply using YouTube like he used Alan Jones and friends before, but even better. Don’t give a press conference where pesky journalists might want answers. Simply put out a nice video statement, get a bit of kudos and attention for the way you’re doing it, and get your message through to first bite without any critical analysis. Clever.
Pity it’s not working, though.
On a slightly on-topic note, the proprietor of myspace.com/kevinrudd, a supporter page, is offering the profile name up for sale, with bidders to name their price.
It’s interesting to see a sort of domain squatting arising on myspace, where the site has become so ubiquitous that a Kevin Rudd subdomain might actually have some value!
Even better would be for whole press conferences to be put up onto these video sites without editing. At the moment you get the excerpts of them filtered which best fit to the bias of the particular tv/radio station. Even just watching both the SBS and ABC news shows some interesting differences in way stories are presented, let alone comparing against coverage by a commercial network.
In both his YouTube forays to date, Howard’s message has been posted at around 5 am. Rudd was getting up earlier and earlier and beating Howard with first appearances in the media, so maybe Howard’s essential strategy with YouTube is not merely to engage with yoof, if at all, but to trump Rudd in the daily news cycle with new policy announcements absent pesky journos…
Methinks Tim’s spot-on with youtube = press call without pesky questions from press.
He cares a bit about the comments, otherwise they wouldn’t be being regularly purged. Thousands of them were repeatedly torn down, put up again, torn down again, from first JHo YT, and it’s happening again, even less time between purges this time.
It’s ironic what, this technology, supposed to be democracy’s great hope, in practice being used to sidestep the opportunity for scrutiny that the old-fashioned press conference afforded.
Oh for the day when the mainstream press sees the censorship aspect, the voice of the people being denied, as THE story.
Hmmm, Rupert thinks, how can I monetise comments?
Soon Howard and Rudd will be getting up before they go to bed. What next? Eating gravel?
Mark Bahnisch, a Griffith University sociology lecturer, said Mr Howard was wasting his time.
“He uses the medium really badly. There was no particular reason to make an announcement about a Tasmanian hospital on YouTube.
“Politicians need to immerse themselves in the online medium and use its specific features — its interactivity and its capacity to create a ‘viral’ effect.”
For heaven’s sake, Mark!
Don’t help him!
Heh.
“What do you expect them to do – fall on the ground and grovel, eat gravel? Get real!”
That’s a funny site, and so much better than a lot of the stuff that attempts to be satirical on the web.
Check out the fake Alex Downer site while you’re at it.