Candidates for BC Liberal Leadership: Measuring Online Influence
The BC Liberal leadership race is taking place in a landscape where online influence is as important as offline activity. What does that mean for aspirants like Falcon, Abbott, de Jong, Stilwell (and Clark)?
The impact of technology on the upcoming BC Liberal party leadership race promises to dramatically change the way political battles are won and lost.
During the provincial Liberals' last leadership contest in 1993, most party members didn’t have email accounts, and the only Internet access found in homes across British Columbia, if any, was a slow dial-up connection. Online campaigning has taken centre stage since then, with the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign seeing online campaigning become as important as candidates’ offline activity.
According to The Atlantic, in February 2008 alone, the Obama campaign raised $55 million, $45 million of it coming from their online efforts.
In the 2010-11 BC Liberal leadership cycle, candidates must adapt to a landscape in which over 2 million British Columbians are active on Facebook, and news cycles are measured in seconds. Thanks to social networks like Twitter, stories can break and impact campaigns faster than was ever thought possible in the past.
Competing leadership campaign teams will be live-streaming their candidates’ events using smart phones from every corner of the province, and no public comment from any candidate will go unreported. The candidates and campaign teams who are best able to adapt to this during the 2011 provincial leadership race will have a distinct advantage.
With four candidates officially now in the race this week, we review where they stand in their online presence and online campaign efforts:
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