Austria’s conservative peoples party invited a handful bloggers to cover the annually party convention. Obviously not more than a PR experiment, but an interesting one, and, frankly, one I wouldn’t have expected from that side of the political landscape.
Besides inviting bloggers, the party will be posting videos on YouTube and photos to Flickr, making friends on MySpace and even is represented in Second Life. Seems like they got some social media budget to play with.
Politicians writing blogs, doing podcast, vlogs or generally participating personally in Web 2.0 (to name the buzzword) are nothing new. As one could observe during US elections those are quite powerful methods to create awareness. At the same time it must be handled carefully. Social media is controlled by the people, beyond the influence of PR departments or press agencies. Once the wrong message is out it can’t be controlled any more and, as we know, bad news are spreading fast, much faster than good news.
Since social media popularity in Europa isn’t as high as in the US, there is still some room for (safe) experiments left, like this one of the peoples party. Blogs surely offer a clever possiblity to reach certain audiences, still a small but increasing target group (as far as I know blogs are currently read by bloggers in the first place) and partly acting as multiplicators.
So what does it mean to invite known and rather popular bloggers instead of advising the own press department to set up and maintain a blog?
The invited bloggers can’t be said to be conservative or traditional peoples party followers. They simply had the opportunity to watch the convention, presentations and speeches (from the best press table btw) and blog about it, or not, don’t if they were asked to write at least a minimum of words on their blogs.
There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
(Brendan Behan)
The result of that experiment is mainly a controversial discussion about the party, speeches, concepts, etc. in the blogosphere. Even a post titled “7 reasons why I will not vote for this party” from one of the invited bloggers showed up.
Inviting guest bloggers were in that case quite a good option: the posts are not directly seen as marketing activity and therefore leave a more honest impression than other initiatives. It doesn’t really matter if the posts are positive or negative. Suddenly blog readers receive an entire stream of posts about the peoples party. Posts which trigger follow-ups (like this post), lead to discussions within the blogosphere and create even more awareness about the party. Hey, otherwise I never ever would’ve thought about or even mentioned the party convention.
After all, I think it was a very clever move.
Can’t be, no AdSense ad is showing up. Nowhere. Even on a high traffic sites like Digg the ad banner remains empty. Or maybe it’s just a local problem within my network.
Austria’s