Party websites find new pools of voters

David Akin
Canwest News Service

A frame of the Liberal website www.scandalpedia.ca. (Canwest)

OTTAWA - With no small amount of glee, Conservative party operatives - usually young and mostly male - have spent months assembling video footage of just about every dumb thing ever said by Stephane Dion and other Liberals.

Early Tuesday morning, they unleashed most of that video at a new, often-nasty, anti-Dion site called www.notaleader.ca.

The Liberals have been having fun, too, at the expense of Stephen Harper and several cabinet members. Tuesday morning, they launch their own attack site at www.scandalpedia.ca.

Scandalpedia.ca, which draws its inspiration from online reference site Wikipedia, is an online compendium, a Liberal campaign official says, of Conservative scandals and failures to honour campaign promises involving the likes of Maxime Bernier, Stockwell Day and John Baird.

The Liberals also plan to launch yet another separate Web site which will essentially be an online biography of Dion.


"The party that ran on accountability has not exactly covered itself in ethics and accountability," said the Liberal official.

These website launches are the newest iterations in campaigns that, so far, have been characterized by a lot of name-calling between Tories and Liberals. They're also a good example of how all parties are using the latest online services and technologies to reach past traditional methods of communications to find new pools of voters.

"This is an area we've spent a lot of time thinking about since the last campaign," said a Conservative official who previewed the new website for Canwest News Service on the condition he not be identified.

The challenge for political communicators is that a key demographic, young people, do not watch TV as much as they once did and are spending more time online. As a result, marketers are using new digital techniques to reach that online audience. Some of those techniques, such as a plain-vanilla website, have been around for a decade or more. But newer forms of reaching out to a digital audience are now also being harnessed by the campaigns.

These newer forms include services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, a group of Internet-based applications often known as social-networking tools because they allow users to form ad hoc groups or small networks of friends based on a common interest.

"The thing that is amazing about all this stuff is that it enables your folks to help share our campaign effort and just what's going on with the campaign or around the campaign with their friends and neighbours," said Nammi Poorooshasb, who is co-ordinating the NDP's digital campaign.

The NDP online campaign is keyed off of www.ndp.ca but contains links to NDP content at Facebook and Twitter.

The Conservative official said the type of voter targeted by notaleader.ca at tends to be someone between 18 and 30, who has not yet developed a loyalty to one political brand or another.

"They are anti-establishment, libertarian, web- and tech-savvy, and politically incorrect," said the Conservative adviser. "We set out to build a website that appeals to them."

Conservatives believe part of that appeal will include lines many Liberals wish they'd never said, such as deputy leader Michael Ignatieff's musings on puffins and their excrement or Dion's infamous line from a leadership candidate debate when he said, "You think it's easy making priorities?"

The Tory website is full of interactive opportunities that use those and other lines to make fun of Dion and the Liberals. Users can create their own anti-Dion television ads and then e-mail those ads to their friends.

The Conservatives have also spoofed Facebook, one of the most popular social network websites in Canada, by creating look-a-like Facebook pages for Dion and other Liberals.

"Our goal is to keep them entertained and give them lots to do," said the Conservative official.

The Conservatives say the digital aspect of the campaign is a secondary or supporting layer of a broader communication strategy. The leaders' tours, mainstream-media advertising, and the debates tend to be the primary means of influencing voting intentions.

"But this allows us to extend the reach of our media buy," said the Conservative official. "It brings in people as activists and volunteers."

Campaign websites:

Conservative party
www.conservative.ca
www.notaleader.ca

Liberal party
www.liberal.ca
www.scandalpedia.ca
www.promisebreakers.ca

NDP
www.ndp.ca

Green party
www.greenparty.ca

Bloc Quebecois
www.presentpourlequebec.org