SMM in politics, pros, cons, specifics of work

Hello dear habrayuzer

Many here have an idea of ​​what SMM is, they know and, I think, successfully apply their knowledge in practice in business and agencies. But it seems to me that few people thought about the place of SMM in politics (political PR). However, this also exists and is in demand. I want to talk to you about this direction. But before starting, let's agree that we are specialists (we are specialists?), And it does not matter for us to “root for”, this is not the place for political discussions and holivars. This article is generally related not so much to politics as to the specifics of work in this area. I will analyze a particular batch only because I have experience working with it. But if you have experience with another party, I will be glad to learn about your experience.


I'll start with a little preface to myself. I work on the difficultly demanding position of deputy head of the social media department of the LDPR faction in the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation By profession I am watered. technologist. In fact, this is PR in politics, state. structures, batches, etc. I am interested in politics exclusively from a working point of view. But I try to do my work well. Similarly, our department. I can say that the department (not me personally) managed to raise a blog on mail.ru, earning more than a million friends in My World and more than 325 thousand regular readers of the blog without cheating. What you agree a great achievement. My task is to attract people and introduce really high-tech and interesting projects (see below), which means attracting the electorate that is not yet covered, and not maintaining the loyalty of the existing one.

We will finish the preface. Let's look at the pros and cons of the political SMM (I note that I will not disassemble the SMM as such).
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Let's start with the cons:

• Total lack of budgets. Yes, many political parties and politicians are aware of the power and sense of working with an Internet audience, social networks, etc. But among these subjects there is a perception that the Internet is an environment where you can do everything well and for free. Not only is the mechanics of the work itself not run-in, many technologies are simply not applicable, many moves require offline work with the audience, so also the lack of a budget even for simple tools for analysis (the same brendoscope, PostRank and others) is obvious. This complicates the work incredibly (not to be confused only, I'm not talking about advertising on the Internet, but about more subtle matters such as PR).
• Total lack of human resources. Mostly in politics they consider that the Internet is the area in which you are a programmer, a designer, a PR manager, and an analyst. This affects the quality of work. Outsourcing is denied as a concept. I want to note that for a normal political campaign on the Internet, at least two “monitors”, one analyst, one creative, two copywriters and one marketer / PR aka head of department are needed. And this does not consider outsourcing - the same designs, programmers, layout designers, “hamsters” (aka support group).
• Total lack of time object promotion. Contrary to popular belief, parties, deputies and the like simply have a huge amount of work, sometimes it’s simply impossible to put in an interview, thoughts for a blog or a presence at a sudden Internet conference (organized not by an expert, of course). Therefore, in this area it is simply necessary to have a powerful base for maneuvers. Pre-prepared tweets, direct speech, videos, photos. Content should not be idle. This rule and violate his death like. The worst thing is the difficulty of establishing feedback. Especially if you have thousands of comments, and you control a personal blog. A politician simply does not have time to answer everyone. Therefore, this problem is acute, but it is completely solvable.
• Total misunderstanding of the electorate. No offense will be said, but you must admit, few of us go to the polls and are seriously interested in political ideology and parties. Personally, I do not know of a single party on the Internet. Young people who know what foursquare is of little interest are that Zyuganov is holding a picket, and Zhirinovsky is holding a rally on the topic of increasing gasoline prices. However, such powerful tools should not be idle. My task is to turn such a “non-target” electorate into a target audience.

But there are pluses:

• One of the main advantages is the presence of the existing electorate. Whatever party or politician you work with, there are always people involved in it. And, as a rule, they are very malleable. It is easier to work with them than with picky customers or customers.
• High inclusion in infopovody. Virtually every achievement or action of a policy on the Internet is a good information guide. The political segment is very poorly developed, so any action on the Internet of any politician is almost always interested in the media. This feature helps a lot in work. Journalists, users and simply interested specialists are very eager to communicate with us.
• The illusion of belonging. Who among us would not like to touch the power and talk with the powers that be? I think many want. The Internet allows you to give this illusion.

These are the main pros and cons. There are many others, but these are among the most important and universal. Now I think you will be interested to know about a specific example. I will not say for all areas of work, but I will tell you how I plan to attract the “untargeted electorate”. I'll tell you on the example of the action that is being prepared.

Gradually adjusting the feedback process, by the way, it was a good decision, instead of answering all the comments, due to the impossibility of recording video responses. Firstly, they can be put on all networks that exist, and secondly, usually such answers are reposted by the authors of the questions. Thirdly, you can always control who asked the question and which audience will read it after the repost. And, fourthly, no one doubts that the politician is responsible himself, and does not entrust it to assistants, which is credible. After such a move, I decided to simultaneously take up actions and contests, because we need not only reviews, but also adequate perception and possible information channels, in order to attract, let not a loyal electorate, but people who can be shown that politics can have a human face . Literally a week earlier, I was doing a digital project related to geolocation for Societe Perier (unfortunately they didn’t take it) on a freelance basis, and it occurred to me that I could arrange some kind of action using Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, timed to the traditional rally. Gant-chart was quickly sketched:


The meaning was simple. The main goal is to attract people and likes to the Facebook page. Why this should work:

• Tags Quite a large number of fans pages social. networks in facebook. Many fans flow to us with tags. So we got almost 100 likes in 8 hours (a modest result, but for our Facebook growth of 3-5 likes per day is not bad) from Twitter, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook tags.
• Interest. At the moment, the main target of this action is the most “advanced” and politically inactive youth. Attracting them to such an action carries two semantic loads. Show the interest of politicians on the Internet (in a positive sense: understanding, ability to use it, healthy interest). And preparation for the main stage of attracting the Internet environment to the party. This is a long-playing goal, which is already designed for work inherent in the parliamentary party (I will not reveal all the cards yet, but I’ll say that this will be a joint work with good feedback in the field of Internet legislation).
• Advertising classics - see more, like more, notice more.

Having dealt with these advantages, we carried out a small analytical work (a small one, since it would be useless to rely on business intelligence in this area).
Judge what happened - you. I cite the links (I’ll say right away that they lead to the landing page on Facebook, therefore, so that they don’t consider that it is an advertisement, if someone has enough text and explanations, they can be limited to):
link to the tab page itself

reference to conditions
In conclusion, I want to say that it may seem to someone that this is a fairly standard work, but if you trace all the drawbacks that I voiced above, the specifics themselves, you begin to understand that it is quite difficult to do in terms of Internet apathy and mistrust of power, politicians and political reality. Moreover, no politician did anything like that. There is an opinion that this is not serious and not worthy. I simply tried to combine the usual and necessary work of a political party, like a rally, with a more interesting action on the Internet.
Thanks for attention.

The author of the article Pruntoff is ready to answer your questions.