University of Erfurt Erfurt School of Public Policy Course: Network Politics Lecturer: Phillipp Mller Summer Term 2009

Twitter - Campaigning:

The usage of Social media in contemporary political campaigns

Written by: Moritz Borchardt (Student Nr: 23506) Mhlhuser Strae 2 99092 Erfurt Phone: 0361 2192427 Email: Moritz.Borchardt@stud.uni-erfurt.de

Index
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Introduction The professional use of Twitter The problem of authenticity Measuring success in Twitter German parties using Twitter Conclusion and Recommendation 1 2 3 4 5 7

Annex: Sources, Statistical Data

I. Introduction
With the emergence of social media in the last ten years, the world witnessed the rise of a whole new school of thought. The most crucial aspect of this mentality is the emphasis on openness in every part of society, which implies the capability of changing broad areas of both professional and personal life. Having been a relatively secluded part of internet-society at first, social media became more and more well known with the establishment of the web 2.0. This development of a read-write culture in the internet, consisting of blogs, newsgroups etc. led to various new possibilities for actors in the economy, politics and social life. It was eventually fueled and extended by the release of Facebook in 20041 and Twitter in 20062. These new services expanded the possible modes of virtual communication from comparatively slow articles directed at a limited target group to real-time updates and the (digital) public at large. In enabling this newfound way of communicating, both Facebook and Twitter created numerous ways of promotion, especially concerning entrepreneurial outreach and political communication. The potential use of social media for political campaigns became obvious when Barack Obama led his 2008 presidential campaign using the tools of the web and in doing won seemingly apolitical people into joining his cause. In Germany, the first use of Twitter in an electoral campaign took place in the hessian elections in early 2009, that was the first after Obamas success via social media. The intention of this paper is to observe the possibilities of using Twitter for political ends and the extent to which Twitter is being used by established German parties. In doing so, initially there will be a short overview about Twitter itself and its potential to be used in corporate, professional ways. In addition, one article will describe the general problem of authenticity that is inherent to any social media. This will be followed by a short overview of success in social media and its measurement in microblogs like Twitter. Furthermore, an article will observe the general use of Twitter by German political parties. In the final part of this paper, the presented argument will be summarized and a recommendation for future political actors will be given on account for the given data.
1 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet 2 https://twitter.com/about#about

II. The professional use of Twitter

When Twitter was first released in March 2006, its users were a small community of inter-connected people that developed slowly but surely. A crucial aspect to the success of Twitter was its application programming interface (API). The API allowed programmers to create applications, which use Twitter as an integral part or even embed Twitter to websites. This feature enabled users to twitter from a variety of platforms, even via competing products like Identi.ca. So, it was possible to tweet from virtually any digital medium as long as there was an application to do so. Twitter eventually introduced sending updates via text messaging, so that it can be used from virtually anywhere.3 Microblogging and Twitter got remarkable publicity during the first months of 2009, when it was used in various occasions such as the emergency landing of a plane in Hudson River. 4 Following up to these events, Twitter grew from 3.15 Million users to 11.5 Million within the first five months of 2009 with a peak of growth in March 2009.5 Concerning both professional and political actors, Twitter can be used in a twofold manner. First of all, it can be used for outreach and thus, to promote new products or political statements. In doing so short term changes can be announced, events made public and internal meetings be fixed. In political practice it is currently popular to use Twitter as a short-term newsletter for any occasion, as will be seen in the course of this paper. The second possible approach of using microblogs is to get feedback through communicating with customers and the interested public. By this, critical opinions are presented and can be discussed, errors can be detected before they inflict damage and the gap between professionals and 'the people' decreases. By practicing this second use, both professional and personal branding can take place, as the actor and the public sphere behave around each other. So, in using mircoblogs, professionals can gain new possibilities of quick and variable outreach as well as new channels of communication with the audience, which almost certainly will have some influence on their reputation.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging 4 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/plane-crashes-in-hudson-first-pictures-on-flickrtumblr-twitpic/ 5 Alex Cheng et al.: Inside Twitter http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ (2009)

III. The problem of authenticity

Apart from these chances that Twitter offers to anyone willing to use it, politicians who use it have to face the problem of authenticity. As soon as they reach a certain level of popularity, political actors are likely to have fake-accounts using their name. Governing officials most likely have fake-accounts driven by the political opposition that are publishing satirical updates contrary to the persons personal opinion. Apart from being well or mal intended, every tweet of public persons who actually use microblogs can be put into question because it can never be fully solved whether someone is twittering himself, or not. Even though some politicians may be able to create a reputation of tweeting themselves, in all possibility those might be fake or written by one of the person's employees. One case of a fake-account that tricked the public into believing that it was real was @muentefering that claimed to be the Twitter-account of the head of Germany's social-democratic party (SPD), Franz Mntefering. Not doing any damage to the party, the account was tolerated by the SPD, that neither verified, nor falsified its authenticity.6 Being aware of this problem, Twitter launched a beta-version of 'Verified Accounts' in mid June 2009.7 This feature has the chance of increasing the credibility of Twitter-accounts although the process of verification has not yet been disclosed.8 Still being in a beta-version of Verified Accounts, a hack on musician Britney Spears's account announced her dead on june 29th.9 This shows that even presumably safe accounts can still be manipulated. In the end, users of microblogs will have to be skeptical but willing to trust politicians and other people of public interest to be who they claim to be. On the other hand, these persons of interest will have to gain the trust of their followers by behaving in a credible way.
6 Marin Majica: Aus dem Herzen der SPD, Berliner Zeitung, Berlin 2008 http://www.berlinonline.de/berlinerzeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2008/0913/seite1/0091/index. html 7 Pete Cashmere: Twitter Launches Verified Accounts http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/twitterverified-accounts-2/ 8 Richard Meusers: Twitter plant Gtesiegel fr Promis http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,629147,00.html 9 Sacha Lobo: Twitpic-Sicherheitslcke http://saschalobo.com/2009/06/29/twitpicsicherheitsluecke-britney-spears-falsche-todesmeldung/

4 Another question to be posed in this context is if politicians can delegate the use of mircoblogs, or tweet via ghostwriter and still be 'authentic'. Depending on the rank of twittering politicians, it might be near to impossible for some of them to regularly tweet themselves and thus, to maintain public interest over time. Given these presuppositions, delegating the use of Twitter or tweeting indirectly can be the obvious choice for public actors to make. One possible option to increase transparency would be, though, to indicate the origins of tweets by adding hints to updates by the staff. In doing so, the accounts in question would still be able to frequently communicate with the public in the name of its owner, but in the same time, the public would be informed about the origin of tweets.

IV. Measuring success in Twitter

General success in Twitter can be described by the size of one users incoming and outgoing contacts as well as his frequency of twittering. Additionally, not just the extent of the network, but also the communicative behavior in terms of @usermessages sent and received by accounts are of major importance to display interconnectivity. Concerning political campaigning via Twitter, the existing concept needs to be extended by the aspect of influence on other users. This can be visualized by measuring retweets, which is technically simple, yet still not sufficient. Mobilization does not just happen via forwarding other user's tweets, but instead is often exercised through commenting on abbreviated tweets or @user references to discuss recent matters like political press-releases etc.. Furthermore, the statistical tools and existing data of the web (in early July 2009) are insufficient for scientific research. The statistical applications scarcely go beyond the measurement of average tweets per day and the relative amount of @user replies. Regarding retweets, there are only few services that use them and even if so, the basic statistical patterns are sometimes unclear, or use approaches that cannot be effectively used in combination with different statistics. Also, there are naturally few statistical surveys that include most of the first half year 2009, in which Twitter grew significantly and so cover the even more public months of tweeting and being (re-)tweeted . Consequently this paper cannot claim to be statistically correct or deliver highly consistent data. The most valuable datasets that can be used nonetheless are from

5 www.tweetstats.com and www.retweetrank.com, and can be combined to gain insights on single accounts. They still lack the option of showing clusters of users in their respective twitter-environment and thus the possibilities of visualizing general influence on other users of Twitter.

V. German parties using Twitter

The idea of using microblogs in political campaigns in Germany was inspired by Barack Obama's virtual campaigning during the 2008 presidential elections in the USA. Thus, the first german elections where Twitter was used as a political tool were the electoral campaigns in Hessia in January 2009. During these elections, all major parties used Twitter for political outreach, and social-democratic candidate Thorsten Schfer-Gmbel (@tsghessen) made himself a brand by establishing the credibility of twittering himself. His authenticity was later damaged when one of his campaigning advisers updated his own account and @tsghessen with the exact same tweet within a very short time. This again stresses the point of basic uncertainty in digital societies.10 Theoretically spoken, Twitter can be used to communicate political content, or act politically in three ways: First of all, it can be used as a newsletter that publishes political news and links to websites with further information. In practice, these newsletters are used to make articles public, which carry out the partys values and are the most common use of contemporary German Twitter-campaigning and can be estimated at 50 percent of the overall of German political tweets send by parties and non-private persons. This option of communicating is closest to the ways of traditional media, where breaking news and earlier special editions of newspapers were produced to keep the public up to date. The second use of Twitter in virtual campaigns is making political statements within the 140 character-limit of Twitter. This limit forces political actors to make short comments, prohibiting long and abstract statements. In the first months of 2009, this option of using Twitter politically was rarely used, but in the aftermath of the European elections in early June 2009, became more common, so that it can be
10 Markus Beckedahl: Wenn Politiker mit Ghostwritern twittern http://netzpolitik.org/2009/wennpolitiker-mit-ghostwriter-twittern/ (2009)

6 estimated at 20 percent of the overall of German political tweets send by parties and non-private persons. Thirdly, Twitter can be used to give status reports of politicians about where they are, what they do etc.; by using Twitter in this way, politicians can share random details of their lives with the public and thus create emotional closeness with their supporters and talk about recent or upcoming events. Being limited to personalized accounts (accounts that are used by politicians instead of party organs), this kind of tweeting can be estimated at 30% of active political tweets. Due to the many elections taking place in 2009, all of Germany's mayor parties have started to use Twitter regularly and created a wide range of accounts. These accounts can be divided into two kinds of accounts: The first kind of accounts belongs to party organs, local chapters or youth organizations of the present parties in parliament. Examples for such are @cdu_news, @spdbawue or @JuLisThueringen. These accounts are primarily used to inform about recent or upcoming campaigning events and to link to articles promoting the parties opinions. The second kind of accounts is held by individual politicians and used for both political outreach and personal comments. Among the politicians actively using Twitter, there are representatives from all political levels and parties. Both the already mentioned @tsghessen and member of parliament @volker_beck (green party) are examples for microblogging politicians of status, that use Twitter in different ways. @tsghessen uses Twitter mainly to post personal updates, promote his affection to coffee and only uses it on rare occasions to give political statements like Zu Guttenberg ist echt ein industriepolitisches Irrlicht. Selten so sauer auf einen Politiker gewesen. Unverantwortliches Geschwaetz! (rough translation: Zu Guttenberg (german Federal Minister for Economy and Technology) is not to be taken seriously in terms of industrial policy. Never been so angry about a politician. That's irresponsible talk!)11. Additionally, he rarely posts links (with only one link from 15/04/09 to 15/05/09), but responded to other user's tweets in around about 30% of his tweets. Differing from him, Volker Beck uses Twitter mainly to interact with other users (more than 77% of his tweets from 15/04/09 to 15/05/09 are either @-responses or retweets) and barely posts status reports. In doing so, he too has established himself in the German internet
11 http://twitter.com/tsghessen/statuses/1912873506

7 community and been using Twitter politically in a variety of ways by simply 'being online', but not in a more personal, private way like @tsghessen but creating a professional account that interacts with others and adds both links and statements for political outreach.

VI. Conclusion and Recommendation

This paper has shown, that political campaigning via Twitter is still in a very early stage of development, due to its just recently discovered values and chances. Twitter itself suffers from the problem of authenticity, which is inherent to any social media, but is slightly more important in Twitter, than in other media, as the shortage of messages makes it near to impossible to discover well-made fake accounts. In Germany, Twitter is still not commonly used in ways that differ from traditional media newsletters or Facebook- status reports. Although it has become well-discussed by other media, Twitter has still an aura of being dubious. This could be seen in the so called german Twittergate, when the results of the elections for the german president were first published via Twitter, even before they were officially announced.12 Also, it is remarkable, yet not suprising, that Twitter is mainly used in interactive ways by political parties, that consider themselves politically left, especially the green party, and youth-organizations throughout the landscape of politics. If political actors want to use social media to their benefit, they basically have to be online and interact with other users. Volker Beck is a very fitting example, as he not just posts random articles and links, but actually uses Twitter to get feedback on his actions and political points of view. Tweeting newsletters or status reports is still very useful to share informations and inform about upcoming or recent events, but it is not, what makes Twitter unique. This is the interaction with other users, by discussing matters with and getting feedback from the public and also by stimulating the public into getting involved and actively convincing others. These are things, that german political parties have yet to learn when it comes to digital political communication and interaction, especially in Twitter.
12 Spiegel-Online: Twittergate http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,627936,00.html

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Annex

Sources:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet https://twitter.com/about#about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/plane-crashes-in-hudson-first-pictures-on-flickrtumblr-twitpic/ Alex Cheng et al.: Inside Twitter http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ (2009) Marin Majica: Aus dem Herzen der SPD, Berliner Zeitung, Berlin 2008 http://www.berlinonline.de/berlinerzeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2008/0913/seite1/0091/i ndex.html

Pete Richard Sacha Markus

Cashmere: Meusers: Lobo:

Twitter Twitter

Launches plant

Verified fr

Accounts Promis

http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/twitter-verified-accounts-2/

Gtesiegel

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,629147,00.html

Twitpic-Sicherheitslcke Wenn

http://saschalobo.com/2009/06/29/twitpicmit Ghostwritern twittern

sicherheitsluecke-britney-spears-falsche-todesmeldung/

Beckedahl:

Politiker

http://netzpolitik.org/2009/wenn-politiker-mit-ghostwriter-twittern/ (2009)

http://twitter.com/tsghessen/statuses/1912873506 www.tweetstats.com www.retweetrank.com

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Annex

Statistical Data
Statistical data of Volker Beck and Thorsten Schfer-Gmbel from 15.04.09 to 15.05.09 Politician Follow Overall @user- Retweets Links Status- Statements News 2 -ers Tweets Tweets1 reports 2 2 6/8/09 Volker Beck

3612 111
103

72 32

14 0

59 1

8 67

17 6

14 8

Thorsten 3335 SchferGmbel

1 2

answers to multiple users in one tweet were counted as one non- @user or re-tweets could be attributed to one or multiple of the categories: personal status-report, political statement, or news