So after the ball is over…… Australians see the prospect an equally divided vote and a hung parliament.
Did the 2010 election live up to its expectations as being a social media election?
Tony Abbott very early in the piece virtually stopped using social media. He produced a very small amount of tweets and very few Facebook entries. Gillard, on the other hand tweeted and Facebooked and YouTubed a lot, though not necessarily in an interactive way.
We will have to wait for some PhD student to analyse the data and see if there is some cause and effect here, to see the effects on voting patterns and politicians social media use bu their is no necessary obvious correlation…… though lotsa questions posed.
Malcolm Turnbull who has a developed a voracious online appetite had a swing of 11.5% to him at the election. Joe Hockey another frequent tweeter had a swing in his electorate of 8.6% & Julia Gillard4.5%. Just as interesting was the 4% swing away from Rudd who does tweet and 5% swing in his favour for Tony Abbott who left behind all pretense of online communication following his pollie pedal.
To win government Tony Abbott needed to win more seats in NSW. Four more seats in NSW would have seen him in government, but he wasn’t able to translate that personal swing in his electorate into this winning vote. If he … had he… could he have…?
It does seem the overwhelming winner for online communication was the voting public. On election night Julia Gillard stated that the people had spoken but she couldn’t understand what they were saying yet. Perhaps if she (or her minders) had trawled the comments on her facebook page or through the tweets on #election or #ausvotes to get an idea of what the people were saying or thinking.
The public have been able to source much understanding about ideas, policies and attitudes from a wide variety of sources and biases online and so were not just stuck listening to party spine.
Perhaps this is the online message we can gain from the election results. People want communication about real ideas and not just manufactured spin. As Gillard and Aboott and the various Independents ponder their position over the next week or so perhaps they should keep that in mind. If they are unsure perhaps they should check out the twitter stream #auswaits
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