techno-culture

I’ve just put the new podcast up, a recording of a talk and Q&A session with Joe Rospars, the man behind Barack Obama’s phenomenally successful use of Web 2.0 technologies in his presidential  campaign and in particular, on his campaign website, barackobama.com. Rospars was in Dublin on Wednesday for the launch of Fianna Fail’s new website, which Rospars’ company Blue State Digital  helped develop. He gave a very interesting talk about the Obama campaign and its use of social networking technologies, and then took nearly 30 minutes of questions from the floor, which I recorded (with permission to podcast) as I though this would be of wider interest. Some of the questions address the use of the same technologies in Ireland. I wonder how successfully those technologies will translate into an Irish setting myself. Here, politics are local rather than distributed, fewer people use or read blogs, Twitter, and other similar communications technologies, and it is I think much harder to sell a party with a whizzy site than it is to promote a single, intensely charismatic individual. In the US, McCain and Palin had a far harder time of making those same technologies work for them.

In one of those “it wouldn’t have happened in the Obama campaign” new media glitches, an Irish partner company, Strawberry Media,  had promoted the talk to bloggers without ever explaining to them that the event was actually a Fianna Fail launch. Lots of tweets and blog posts as a result,  from irate people who should have been told clearly what the event was all about — so much for the transparency and communication the new website is supposed to promote! Really, this should have all been coordinated  better than that. I didn’t realise all this was going on at the time — I heard about the talk because I got an emailed  invite directly from Fianna Fail, presumed it was a normal press launch, so knew it was for the website launch — and on arrival was surprised to be told it was also a “blogger’s meeting” — what? — not quite the case, either. I don’t think Rospars realised what had happened with the blogger invites, as I’m sure such poor communication with exactly the crowd you are trying to reach would not have occurred.

Tags: podcast