We knew since before this election was called that we were going to run
a very social media focused campaign.
The Green Party is not flush with cash like the other parties.
–Camille Labchuk, Federal Councillor of the GPC
For the days leading up to the election call, The Green Party of Canada (GPC) and Elizabeth May barely registered on Twitter. Not surprisingly, things picked up a bit on March 25, spiked shy of 500 tweets the first day of the campaign then trailed off. In many ways, the GPC needed something to galvanize their supporters and get media attention.
They got that yesterday when a consortium of broadcasters announced Elizabeth May would not be invited to participate in the debate.
That’s when the machine kicked in. Tweets were issued to raise awareness of the debate decision, request the reader sign an online petition and pass it on. It was the beginning of an explosion of traffic for the Party and May, an explosion that has put them on the battleground. In the last two days, there have been 4,079 tweets (at the time of this writing) related to Elizabeth May and GPC.
The GPC did three things right.
They were prepared. They knew this was coming because this had happened in the past. They were prepared to activate their community and appeal to the public’s sense of democracy. In many ways, their preparations predate the 2008 election. The Green Party launched the website DemandDemocraticDebates.ca setup in early 2007. The site includes a petition to have the GPC included in the televised debates. The petition is reported to have collected 80,000 signatures in the four years leading up to yesterday’s announcement. GPC quickly updated information on the website before promoting the site on Twitter. The Party has collected about 18,000 signatures in the first 24 hours following the announcement. [UPDATE: March 31 @ 6:45am, GPC has confirmed they had slightly more than 84,000 signatures on their petition before its relaunch on Tuesday. As of this update, they had collected just under 20,000 signatures since the relaunch.]
They were agile. When the Twitter campaign began, the message was made slightly longer than it needed to be because of their hashtag (#LetMayDebate). It was suggested by another party member that they change the hashtag to #EMayIn, which they did.
They provided simple calls-to-action. It’s important to give people the ability to act right away if they’re moved by the issue. And, you have to make it easy to understand, and easy and fast to do. As noted above, the Tweets asked people to sign the petition and pass it on. Twitter works like any other network. You tell two friend, then they tell two friends, and so on. Only, Twitter helps make it happen much faster.
TANGIBLE RESULTS
Twitter is the perfect amplifier for what GPC was out to achieve. The conversation combined for 46% of the traffic (fresh 36%, @replies 10%); rebroadcasts through RTs were 54%.
That amplifier effect combined with traditional media has given the online chatter about Elizabeth May and the issue of the debate a significant share of the online voice. This pie chart considers activity in Twitter, blogs, forums and media for both coalition (which has been part of the discourse since the campaign started) and the May/debate issue (which has been around for about 24 hours).
The increased activity means the GPC is more likely to show up more regularly in my analysis. The question is, will they be able to keep the momentum going?
More importantly, which party will be featured here, next?
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