If you are interested in the campaign, I also wrote about it here, here and here.

The workshop was organized by Julia H. Grace [@jewelia], Dejin Zhao [@djzaho] and danah boyd [@zephoria]. It was a great experience and very interesting to discuss the research challenges that microblogging poses with an international and highly interdisciplinary crowd of researchers. I‘ll post my thoughts on the workshop later this day. In this post I‘ll make my presentation and the rough draft of my talk available.

Since I tend to speak freely in presentations this draft might not be exactly what I said, still it should be pretty close. Anyhow this talk was meant as an appetizer to the position paper on the same topic. So, if you‘re looking for something to cite, kindly have a look at said position paper.

Twitter in Politics: Lessons Learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009

by Andreas Jungherr

Draft v.1.0
2010/04/13

In this ignite talk I want to take you on a short trip through my position paper Twitter in Politics: Lessons Learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009, so that by the end of this presentation, you‘ll have an idea on how and why the German party CDU used Twitter in the campaigns of 2009 like it did.

2009 was a special year for political campaigners in Germany. This had two reasons:

One was the relative high density of high-profile elections in this year. In 2009 there were elections in five important Bundesländern, elections to the European parliament, the election of the German Bundespräsident and in autumn, the German general election.This lead to the term Superwahljahr – the year of the super election.

The second reason was Barack Obama, or rather the things Obama did to win the US presidential election, or rather the things the media thought he was doing to win the election.

The German media was quick to identify the microblogging service Twitter as a key element to Obama‘s victory. And while one can find good reasons to disagree with their assessment, Twitter suddenly became the thing to do for up and coming politicians.

As anyone knows who worked with politicians, politicians tend to be like kids with regard to the adoption of knew technology. At first they want nothing to do with anything new, but when the cool kids are flashing a new toy there is nothing more important to them than to possess exactly THAT toy. This is exactly what happened with regard to Twitter in the German political scene from late 2008 onwards.

During 2008 most German politicians kept as far away from Twitter as humanly possible only to flock to the service in the aftermath of the press-storm about the online magic the Obama campaign managed to conjure up. In late 2008 and early 2009 many German politicians regardless of party and age found their inner Twitterer – or the inner Twitterer of a lucky staff member – and started a Twitter account.

This led to considerable concern in all parties since suddenly the campaigns had a social media component that was new to German campaigns. Fortunately the high frequency of campaigns in 2009 proved to be very fortunate for exactly this challenge. Campaigns on the state and European level could be used as prototypes for elements of social media campaigning. So by the time the national campaign went into its hot phase most German parties had had the chance to get acquainted with social media and incorporate it in some way in their grand strategy.

This proved to be a very interesting time to work for political campaigns in Germany. In early 2009 I entered the campaign to reelect the Ministerpräsident of Hessia, Roland Koch. During that campaign my work focused pretty much on the use of Twitter by our online campaign, the webcamp09. Later that year I entered the national campaign for the general elections. There I also worked on the use of Twitter by the campaign but I also worked on the approach the campaign took to social media in general.

This already hints at the way the CDU treated their campaigns in the Bundesländer. These campaigns were not isolated but were used as test cases and prototypes for the use of Twitter and social media in general. Two of the most valuable prototypes for the national campaign proved to be the online campaigns in the Bundesländern Hessia and Saarland. Both campaigns centered their online campaigns with their respective volunteer campaigns, the webcamp09 and the Peter Müller Team 09. Both campaigns used Twitter feeds under the names [@webcamp09] and [@pmt09]. The experiences with these accounts led the national campaign to start a Twitter feed [@teAMDeutschland]. And in turn the lessons learned during the campaign for the general elections in 2009 led to the way the campaign to reelect the Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers uses their Twitter account [@nrwruettgers] in early 2010, a campaign which I advise on their online activities.

So which were some of the lessons learned? Twitter proved a very important tool to do some classic community building. The Twitter feeds [@webcamp09] and [@teAMDeutschland] were both used to get online supporters in contact with each other and to react to their comments or critiques.

Twitter proved to be a very successful channel for the distribution of social objects (after Hugh MacLeod). Most of the time these social objects were not content designed by the campaign but content that was either created by supporters or party candidates who strayed from the official CI.

Twitter proved also to be a very useful backchannel to campaign events. It was possible for supporters and critics alike to follow and comment on campaign events, political TV shows or the debate between Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel and the SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier through Twitter. This proved to be valuable addition to classical campaign events.

Still, the experiences with Twitter during the campaign were not completely unproblematic. One of the biggest issues raised through the widespread adoption of Twitter was a sudden surge in negative campaigning. The content that was distributed the widest through Twitter was mostly negative in nature or contained attacks on the the political opponent. This was true for all political parties. This leads to fundamental questions about the political use of social media and how we can avoid that widespread political use of social media leads to a surge in negative campaigning.

So how are the Twitter efforts of these campaigns to be evaluated. Did they decide the election? Probably not. Personally I think the most important element in the political twittering of 2009 was the active learning process that it started in the party CDU. In the final account it is nor all that important which campaign did use Twitter the best or had the most followers. In the end it matters which political party is able after a campaign to clearly articulate lessons learned and to establish processes that guarantee perpetual learning and prototyping to ensure that said party keeps in contact with its online supporters and online critics.

This was a little appetizer to the content covered in the position paper. For a more detailed discussion of the issues raised in this presentation please have a look at the position paper itself.

Thank you.

During the workshop I will present my position paper Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009 in a short Ignite Talk. Although I have a narrative in mind which could fill the presentation I want to give the old unknown unknown a chance. Therefore I want to ask you which are the points you would be interested in hearing in an Ignite Talk about a paper called “Twitter in Politics: Lessons learned during the German Superwahljahr 2009?”

Oliver Zeisberger betreut mit seiner Agentur den Onlinewahlkampf der NRW SPD während ich das Onlineunterstützerteam der CDU Nordrhein-Westfalen NRW für Rüttgers berate.

Unsere Präsenz beim Politcamp 2010 scheint übrigens auch vom neuen Nerd-Zentralorgan wahrgenommen worden zu sein.

In this paper I use four case studies to illustrate potential uses of Twitter for political activists. The paper was drafted in early 2008 and written in the autumn of the same year. So unfortunately I didn’t address Twitter’s Iran-moment. Still, although some of the examples in the paper may seem dated I hope the lessons drawn from the case studies are still relevant. Judge for yourself.

The paper runs at around 3900 words. If that is a bit daunting have a look at this presentation. This should contain the main idea of the paper. The complete text can be found here.

This paper laid the groundwork for the DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism. It also contains other ideas like the use of Twitter as an information distribution tool or as a communication backchannel which also found their way in other papers.

Andreas Jungherr (2008) ‘Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism’. Paper presented at “Social Web: Towards Networked Protest Politics?” Organized by the SFB Changing Protest and Media Cultures SFB/FK 615 Media Upheavals University of Siegen, Germany on 7-8 November.

For the gist of the paper have a look at the presentation:

In this paper we build on the work we presented in Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels: New Influence on Public Opinion’. In contrast to the earlier work in this paper we focused on the potential agent-based modeling holds for the social sciences in general.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics’, in: Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek, Olaf Wenzel (eds.), 11th General Online Research Conference, GOR 09: Proceedings, Vienna, p. 81.

Modeling Small Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels

In this poster we used the big Lacy/Zuckerberg dustup at the SXSW 2008 to gain some deeper understanding in the dynamics of communication via Twitter. To this end agent based modeling proved to be a very promising research tool.

The Lacy/Zuckerberg session gave a first glimpse on the negative effects of a communication backchannel running wild. Since then other incidents proved the relevance of more research into that phenomenon.

For a closer look at our poster check out the pdf on the publication page for Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels on this blog.

In November Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß and Jörn Lamla published the book “Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt” to which I contributed a chapter on the political uses of Twitter. And the first reviews are in:

Jochen Zenthöfer for politik-digital.de: Wer archiviert eigentlich Twitter?

Christian Jung at Homo Politicus: Nachindustrielle Politik

[Update: 2010/01/11]
Stefan Anderssohn at socialnet: Rezension vom 07.01.2010 zu: Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß u.a. (Hrsg.): Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt. Campus Verlag (Frankfurt) 2009.

[Update: 2010/03/13]
Online Affairs: Politisches Gezwitscher – Wie und Warum Politiker Twitter Nutzen

My chapter is called “Twitterende Politiker: Zwischem buntem Rauschen und Bürgernähe 2.0″. In that chapter I describe how German politicians use Twitter-Feeds. I also attempt to form preliminary usage-categories. SInce the chapter has been written in April of 2009 some of the examples seem a bit dated. Still it seems the categories hold up quite nicely to the test of time. I’m very much looking forward to early 2010 when Pascal Jürgens and I will quantitavely test these categories on a large data-set. So as always, the best is yet to come.

Colin Delany [@epolitics] gives an interesting perspective on the question whether leading politicians should use Twitter:

But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.

This argument focuses on the value of unfiltered vs filtered information for politicians:

While unfiltered information is valuable for bloggers, journalists and those of us with short attention spans, it’s not usually the best thing with which to fill your time when your actions have real-world consequences for, well, the entire world.

This argument does not address the elements of mediated intimacy, access or public conversations that are quite useful to politicians using Twitter. Still this argument is probably a reason for the social media “glass ceiling” which the Belgian blogger Clo Willaerts [@bnox] identified last month in her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. Her term describes the phenomenon that even social media savvy politicians stop using social media channels once they reach a certain level of responsibility.

Maybe Delany’s argument will give some pause to the All-Politicians-Online-All-The-Time Pundits.

An Internet Politics Index to David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win

Colin Delany once again: In this post Delany gives a very useful index of passages that deal with the internet and politics in David Plouffe’s account of the Obama campaign The Audacity to Win, a book that I’ll address in more detail later this month.

Tom Peters: Cool Friends Interview with Garrison Keillor

As a nice diversion from politics I’d suggest this interview with Garrison Keillor. In this piece he talks among other things about his writing and editing process:

[...] as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you’ve written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that’s the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.

Other topics are his show The Prairie Home Companion, the director Robert Altman, public speaking and the durability of sonnets.

If by any cruel twist of fate the name Garrison Keillor means nothing to you have a look at Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes or listen to his News from Lake Wobegon.

From Cool Hunters to Chief Culture Officers: An Interview with Grant McCracken

While preparing a talk on the role of convergence in the online campaigns of various German parties in the run up to the German Bundestagswahl 2009 I turned once again to the work and blog of Henry Jenkins. There I stumbled on this great talk by Grant McCracken at the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. In this presentation McCracken introduces his concept of the Chief Culture Officer and its potential for companies:

Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the “problem of culture” with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that’s my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who’s job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.

McCracken’s book just made it on my to-read list.

Henry Farrell: Political scientists in public debate
This is a nice conversation starter about the roles political scientists should play in the public discourse about politics.

Joshua-Michele Ross: The Rise Of The Social Nervous System
and
Tim O’Reilly: The Social Nervous System Has More Than One Sense
Joshua-Michele Ross gets the ball rolling by talking about the real-life consequences of the use of social media by large groups of interconnected people. Messages send through internet services to a large community of interest become signals that in turn influence behavior. Tim O’Reilly then picks it up and plays with the possibilities when internet services go beyond text messages. What information will be send by our devices and what signals will be picked up by our community of interest?

Quinn Norton: Etech liveblogging: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People (Tony Jebara)
Robert Kaye: ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People
Two accounts of an interesting presentation at this years Etech where Tony Jebara talked about Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People. These are interesting examples on how to infer social context from seemingly unrelated data. Also a reminder for all those who search for the ultimate social graph on the net, that they have to include offline social behavior in their analyses.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky once again comments on the future-of-newspaper debate. His take is: we are living through a transition, we don’t know what will work, we therefor have to experiment – a lot. Sounds like just the time for rapid prototyping. His point is, that we have to phrase the question differently. Not, how can we save newspapers. But, how can we provide the functions newspaper provided for society in this new emerging environment.

Paul Starr: Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)
Yochai Benkler: A New Era of Corruption?
Benkler answers to Starr’s original essay on the public goods that will be lost with the death-of-newspapers. He does not share Starr’s pessimistic outlook.

Steven Berlin Johnson: Old Growth Media and the Future of News
This is the transcript of a speech Steven Berlin Johnson at the SXSW09. What makes his take on the death-of-newspaper-story interesting is his vision of locally relevant news that can be reported and distributed through social media and his idea of traditional media outlets as filters to a plethora of news.