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Yes I know all about how Facebook started as the online version of hardcopy handbooks intended to help Harvard students in residence meet one another, and yes I know how when it went beyond university campuses millions of people have joined, and yes I know how for many of them it has become the main vehicle of online existence.

I had a look at the official facebook profiles for Stephen Harper (with 15,000 supporters), Stephane Dion (13,000), Jack Layton (18,000), and Elizabeth May (3000). Looking to the US, as I did in my last post, these numbers are far less than the expected one-tenth of those of the candidates in the US: Obama-Biden at 1,900,000 supporters, John McCain at 540,000, and Sarah Palin at 407,000. But my question is what is there uniquely valuable in their facebook profiles. The profiles contain some of the personal information and links to ads and videos that you can find on their party websites or on YouTube. The profiles also give supporters a chance to post their own pictures and wall posts, if the politician enables that feature – which Harper doesn’t, but the other three do. But the posts on the wall are so numerous (406,000 for Obama-Biden and even 4000 for Stephane Dion) that they cannot represent communication among supporters. Are they simply messages of support or emails to the campaign office?

The more interactive political use of facebook appears to be groups organized around a cause, such as securing Elizabeth May’s participation in the leaders’ debate, or vote-swapping among Liberals, NDP, and Green supporters. Here the members of the group would seem to have actionable information to share with one another. The CBC’s Susan Ormiston reports a total of 400 partisan facebook groups in the election campaign. Again, more of the action would appear to be in these smaller self-organized groups than in the profiles organized by the candidates. As I understand it, that is how facebook is evolving, in that people use it to keep up with a manageable list of people who, at some level, do matter to them.

A facebook group thus seems very different from a YouTube post. When a facebook group gets too big, the objective of communication is not achieved. In contrast, the objective of a YouTube post is to get a message with political implications out to as many people as possible, so high view counts are important as indicator.

Am I missing the boat on this one? Is facebook the future of political web 2.0 or is it a dead end?

The use of YouTube has been the most important development in online politics in the last two years. At this point, YouTube has three political roles: showing gaffes committed by politicians, netizens creating videos supporting or opposing candidates, and candidates themselves posting ads. The most notorious political gaffe posted on YouTube was former Virginia Senator George Allen using the racist term “macaca,” which, with 700,000 views, was a key factor explaining why he is a former senator. The most famous support video is the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama music video, with over ten million views.

Already, a few posts have gotten lots of attention. In the area of gaffes, Conservative bloggers have seized on a clip of Elizabeth May discussing the difficulty of implementing a carbon tax, claiming she said Canadian voters are stupid, while she claims she said, or at least meant to say, that other politicians think Canadian voters are stupid. A reporter from CPAC accompanied Garth Turner going door-to-door and the “typical” voter he visited was the son of his campaign manager. The May episode has gotten about 20,000 views, the Turner episode about 5,000. The most popular Netizen-generated video is a cartoon of Harper talking to Bush on the phone, originally posted two years ago, and now up to 48,000 views, most in the last few days.

Finally, all parties have posted their ads on YouTube, with the most frequently viewed being the NDP’s recent ad attacking Stephen Harper (“A New Kind of Strong”) at 17,000, while the Conservative and Liberal ads extolling Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion, respectively, max at about 10,000 views. For the parties, these posts on YouTube are another way to reach voters, in addition to posting the ads on their own websites and running them on television. What I find disconcerting is that the parties often disable comments when posting on their ads on YouTube.

So far, these are healthy view counts, especially if multiplied by 10 to compare to those in the US. Still we haven’t had a truly viral post – an egregious gaffe, particularly in a debate, or a Netizen contribution so inspiring or hilarious that everyone wants to watch – but it’s only the second week. Regardless, YouTube videos are becoming increasingly important in Canadian election campaigns.

It’s been less than a week, but the campaign is starting to show clearly how online technology changes politics.

• Two party leaders, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton, decide to muscle Elizabeth May out of the leader’s debate. The reaction – an online petition and critical comments on Layton’s facebook page – is immediate, and within a day Harper and Layton reverse themselves.

• The kids in the Conservative war room make two mistakes – the pooping puffin and an email to the media hitting back below the belt at the father of a slain soldier – and they are instantly picked up and amplified and Harper must apologize for both.

The first incident shows how voters can speak up quickly and loudly over the Internet. The second incident shows how power in a political organization has been decentralized and made transparent. Everyone in the war room represents the party in everything he or she emails, text messages, or posts online. A war room can’t run by having every part of every website and every email checked by a supervisor, it must run on the basis of a set of values. Ultimately, the leader is responsible for these values.

It’s still early in the campaign, of course, but a political campaign is made up of millions of actions taken by the foot soldiers and impressions created in the minds of voters. Are they starting to connect the dots?

My conclusion after a visit to all the federal party websites is that they do not come near the leading edge political sites. Two leaders I’ve posted about previously are Barack Obama’s and the 2007 Ontario Liberal party’s. While there are occasional exceptions, most of the federal party sites show the following deficiencies.

Top-Down, not Bottom-Up

Unlike Obama’s site, they provide little opportunity for real engagement. “Action” usually is limited to donating, getting a sign, or working in the constituency. The Conservatives’ “my campaign” page goes a bit further to include sending a form letter to a newspaper or using a prepared script to call talk radio. The Greens and the Bloc are the only parties that take blogging seriously: Elizabeth May posts herself and encourages voters to post.

Policy-Lite

The Bloc and the Greens appear to have the most comprehensive policy papers, though the former focuses on one policy area and the latter on one region. The Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP don’t match the Liberal red books of the past. One of the virtues of a fixed election date, in contrast to this year’s sudden call, is it provides more time to develop a comprehensive manifesto.

Not Much Diversity

The Ontario Liberals have shown diversity in making at least parts of their site available in a variety of languages; the federal sites don’t go beyond the two official ones. Barack Obama’s site has pages for many interest groups (women, veterans, blacks, Hispanics), but there is nothing comparable on any of the federal sites.

Narrowcasts or Portals

The Liberals have four sites (the Liberal site, Green shift, this is Dion, and scandalpedia) while the Conservatives have two (the Conservative site, not a leader). The argument for multiple sites is that each is narrowcasting a particular message in a particular style. The problem with multiple sites is that each takes on a life of its own, potentially departing from the key messages and overall tone of the campaign. This was demonstrated by not-a-leader’s pooping puffin, which was likely the creation of a web developer working with too little sleep, too much caffeine, and without the benefit of adult supervision.
In the voters’ eyes, parties will ultimately own all their messaging, both positive and negative, and I favour putting it all out there on one portal.

It’s evident that the Don Valley West by-election won’t happen, as we head to a general election on October 14. In posting on the election I will be focusing on communication strategies, namely positive narratives extolling the leader’s strengths and the party’s vision and attack narratives taking aim at the policies or leaders of the other parties. I will also be looking at the online aspects of the campaign, in particular the messaging on and capabilities of the party’s websites, and the use of Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

In the last two years YouTube has come to play a particularly important role for circulating both political gaffes (for example. former Virginia Senator George Allen’s use of “macaca” and Hillary Clinton’s (mis)remembered dangerous visit to Bosnia) and statements of support (Yes We Can).

Before diving into the election, I decided to step back and look for the presence of recent former prime ministers on YouTube. Not surprisingly, Pierre Trudeau has the strongest presence, with the most popular video, at 80,000 views, being his famous “just watch me” interview during the 1970 FLQ Crisis. There was much less for Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney, or John Turner. Notably absent were the 1984 leaders’ debate, in which Mulroney clobbered Turner on the issue of patronage appointments, and the 1988 debate, in which Turner powerfully made the case against the Free Trade Agreement. Jacques Parizeau’s notorious speech blaming the sovereigntist defeat in the 1995 referendum on “money and ethnic votes”, however, was there.

I then had a look at Library and Archives Canada’s website. They have a huge visual archive, but the problem is that it is available onsite in Ottawa but not online. There is a gap in political cyberspace between the immediate and quirky videos posted on YouTube and the Archives’ encyclopedic Ottawa-based holdings. The Archive should establish a committee of experts to choose the top 100 Canadian political videos of the last, say, 40 years and post them on the Library and Archives website. It would be a great way of bringing our political history to life.