My election campaign: focus on social media marketing
So as you might already know I’ve enrolled for State Duma elections 2011 in Russia and going to represent interests of «Fair Russia» party. This post is about the strategy I’ve put down the election campaign that is mainly based on working with social media marketing that is actively used by different politicians. I’ve decided to build my campaign, focusing on tools that I use in daily life — social media technologies.
So, the key weapon here is my personal web-site that explains my participation in elections. I’ve decided to make this site as a independent platform for communication and comments in order not to confuse this political initiative and activitiy with my personal blog (alenapopova.ru / alenapopova.com that is dedicated to eGov services, women and social entrepreneurship in Russia and other countries) and to discuss in greater details my principal views on participation in elections, presenting Fair Russia party and what measures, project I’m ready to suggest. The web-site candidate.alenapopova.ru is based on three main principles: Promise — Action – Suggestion.
My suggestions mainly reflect all experiences and practices that I’d attempted to promote to authorities. So you may find all gov 2.0 services that I support and that are mainly initiated by Novosibirsk citizens. The aim of these actions is to gain popularity after its launch and attract new consumers to useservices. And finally the key part is to make them work efficiently not only before but after elections whatever results are.In my opinion, the most interesting projects that are presented on the web-site are «Fair Budget» and «Change your city».
«Fair Budget» is a special project that was created based on usage of open data of region budget for 2011. All budget items are counted (with percentage from total budget) and published in appropriate form for users. Anyone could use one of 3 bottons: agree with this rate, or decide to add more or less money into it. This is the way we could see how citizens want the budget to be in reality. And also user can leave a comment on any item if he thinks that amount of money spend on this or that item should be either decreased or increased.
Another project that requires attention is «Change your city» that is visualized on crowdmap platform that allows all citizens to leave their suggestions and «rebuild» Novosibirsk city by moving or cleaning up buildings, monuments, departments and other objects within Novosibirsk city.
Another tool that I actively use in my election campaign is social networks. We’ve created Facebook Virtual Headquarter that doesn’t concern party activity but mostly dedicated to my personal contribution to politics and also to general idea that I could become the first candidate from Runet in the State Duma as I’ve already gained popularity among online users and by now I’m focusing on with working with this audience, trying to receive their feedback, suggestions and opinions.