I love to have guest writers! It makes me feel like a technology editor again, position that I held for seven happily years in Brazil.
This time we have Alessandra Marseglia who is an Italian professional journalist. She worked as a media and advertising editor and lately as a political reporter from the US. Alessandra built this interesting portray of Social Media in Italy politics. Great lessons to learn. Enjoy!
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It’s not USA, where the 2008 Obama campaign made history and will be the benchmark for every future political campaign all over the world. It’s not one of the Arab Spring countries – Algeria, Egypt or Libya –, where Twitter and Faceboolk helped the revolutions in the making. It’s Italy, one of the countries that more in the world embodies the concepts of history and tradition and where even the media market, dominated today as 30 years ago by free TV, seems old and falling as the Colosseum.
However, in the last year or so, the “Bel Paese” experimented the “disruptive power” of Social Media as an unpredictable force that changed the game’s rules in, at least, two political elections. In the first one, a successful SM campaign helped the candidate to win; in the second election, on the contrary, the misuse of SM cost the election.
November 2009, Apulia, South Eastern Italian region. The incumbent Governor Nichi Vendola struggles with Democratic Party to get nominated for the reelection. What casts a shadow on his nomination is a scandal inside his administration, which pairs with Vendola’s persona himself – a leftist, ex Communist, anti-establishment politician in a Southern conservative region. After months engaged in a fight against his party, Vendola decides to disregard the official endorsement and seek instead the people consensus: if he cannot be the Democratic candidate, he will try to be the people one. To reach this goal the web, and Social Media in particular, is his faithful ally. With the help of the ad agency Proforma, Vendola opens a fan page on Facebook and a channel on YouTube that rapidly reach a wide consensus. In the top-down strategy’s phase, Vendola encourages people’s participation in content creation, building a grassroots movement spread all over Italy and Europe. This people meet on FB and gather in workshops (Le Fabbriche di Nichi) to discuss topics, raise problems and come up with possible solutions and proposals for Vendola’s electoral program. At the end of the campaign there are 463 Fabbriche di Nichi all around the world. Vendola understands also that FB is a fantastic “war machine” for the election day: in the bottom-up strategy’s phase, he sets a widespread and super-efficient organization to bring people to the ballots. The happy ending is guaranteed: Vendola rocks the primary election with 73% of the votes and 3 months later, in March 2010, he wins also the Regional Election with 48% of preferences. Moreover, FB casts him from a regional, local horizon to a national one and today Vendola is one of the front runners for the next National election.
In a country trapped for decades in a rigid TV-centric system, Vendola’s use of Social Media was more than just a political strategy. Vendola recognized in the web the new version of the Italian “piazza”, where today as at the time of the Roman Empire, Italians gather to talk (mostly) about politics. He intercepted the desire of participation among younger voters and understood that empowering them meant unleashing their contagious enthusiasm. And most of all, while other politicians were still focusing on the old way of making politics, he wasn’t afraid to explore a completely new path to reach for consensus. For these and other reasons Vendola earned the nickname “The Italian Obama” by Le Monde Diplomatique.
Social Media didn’t work out as well for Letizia Moratti, the mayor of Milan. It’s the Spring 2011 and, as Vendola, she seeks for the reelection. Less than a month before the election day the polls indicate Moratti well ahead her opponent Giuliano Pisapia, thanks to a massive budget she used mainly for a campaign on traditional media. To be sure to have the victory in the bag, her campaign strategists decide to add Social Media to the media plan and open profiles on Facebook, Twitters and the local community Mirispondi.it. But the lack of confidence and expertise with SM tools played a dirty trick which cost to Moratti her job. First, a Twitter user tricks Moratti’s Twitter account by asking about a quite obvious imaginary neighborhood’s (Sucate) Mosque construction. In response Moratti’s staff doesn’t recognize the provocation and tweets back a serious “We won’t allow it”, unleashing instantly every kind of jokes all over the web. The second misstep follows a TV debate, where Moratti accused Pisapia of an old crime which turned out being false. Once again, the sarcasm spreads all over the web and the catchphrase “That’s all Pisapia’s fault” inspires jokes (some very hilarious), FB pages and tweets. Lastly, Moratti’s FB fans unbelievably grow from 3K to 36K in 2 weeks raising the suspect – lately confirmed by a Wired Italy reportage – of a “black market” of fans.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to say that these three missteps by themselves cost to Moratti her reelection, but we can certainly claim that an unprofessional use of SM contributed to her final defeat and led Pisapia to the victory with more than 58% of preferences.
What can we learn from these two examples? At least 5 lessons:
1. Social Media can turn a weakness into a strength (i.e. Democratic Party opposition Vs Vendola as “people” candidate)
2. Social Media can turn a weakness into a huge failure (i.e. Sucate’s tweet)
3. Social Media challenges traditional media and can be more effective than TV especially for young target
4. Social Media is not “the rabbit out of the hat” (as Moratti’s staff thought). It needs to be cultivated
5. Finally, it’s clear that Social Media alone cannot determine an election, but it’s out of question that in the last years it became a powerful tool for driving political consensus. Henceforth traditional campaign with centralized power needs to coexist with the unstructured digital democracy raising from the web.
Alessandra Marseglia
alemarsi@gmail.com