Election.co.il? Not yet, but getting there.
A lot has been said about the brilliant use of information technology by Obama campaign and the role it played on the election day. I am not talking about microtargeting, which became a too common tool in both camps, but about the use of email, social networking, spreadable media, etc. Obama’s campaign’s received a lot of kudos for its use of technology during this election (also see HE). During the summer I also had a chance to be at a Google organized conference on the use of “new” media in politics, where the changes in the communication landscape were the focus of the discussion. It will be virtually impossible to list all the discussion about the (potential) role of technology in the last presidential campaign in the US. Hearing all that, i decided to take a look at how the Israeli parties and particularly candidates to the Prime Minister (PM) role do. After all, Israel is a high-tech super power.
Prologue
Following are my not very systematic results. This is a rather long, but quite clunked post. I hope you will find it interesting though, because I found the “research” behind it quite intriguing. All in all I looked at the search results for the main parties (Kadima, Likud, Avoda, Shas, Ysrael Beitenu) and the major candidates (Livni, Netanyahu, Barak), at their website, their presence in social networks, and in spreadable media. Please let me know what you think.
To ease your reading, here are the links to different parts of this post. Read just the one that interests you.
- Search for parties
- Search for candidates
- Party websites
- Personal websites
- Parties on social networks
- Candidates on social networks
- Candidates in spreadable media
- Parties in spreadable media
- Epilogue
I decided to start with looking at what somebody would find trying to look up information about the parties. After all, we want people to make informed choices and internet brings information at our fingertips :) I conducted all the searches in Hebrew on November 10, 2008, and here is what I found.
In most cases, when you look for the major parties in Google, the first result will lead to the party’s website. This is clearly the case with Kadima, Likud, Shas, and Yisrael Beitenu. Searching for Avoda, however, yields mostly job-search related results, and you will not find the party’s website among at least the first 30 results. This probably stems from the fact that unlike other party names, which are relatively unique, “Avoda” in Hebrew stands for work and is a rather common word. However, if you specify that you are looking for the political party Avoda, you still get weird results. The first result is a Wikipedia article about the party, but non of the following links clearly suggests a party’s website. There is a link to verify your membership in the party, but we will get to it later. Interestingly, none of the parties is utilizing the option of advertising with Google, which was “given” in the US election, even though searches for candidates’ names and parties usually yielded their websites as the top result.
Testing the same searches with local search engines, such as Walla (powered by Yahoo) and MSN.co.il (powered by MS Live Search), yielded somewhat different results. Searching for Avoda with Walla, lead to the same job-related results. Specifying that you are looking for the political party, still yeilds some job-related results at the top, and only then some party-related content. Searching for Kadima yielded the Wikipedia article about the party as the top result, followed by party-related results with the link to the main party website only as the 10th result. Searching for Shas, Likud, and Yisrael Beitenu leads to the parties’ website as the top result. Walla also has an option for contextualized ads, but non of the parties seem to utilize those.
Searching with MSN.co.il yielded results very similar to those of Google.
All in all these are good results for Shas, Likud, and Israel Beitenu, and rather decent results for Kadima. Their website and related (positive) information can be easily found with the most simple search. Kadima is not doing very well with Walla, which is one of the (if not the) most popular search engine in Hebrew these days. At the same time, these are rather bad news for Avoda, as their information is very difficult to find.
So, far we reviewed the search results for the main political parties competing in the February election. What happens if we search for the three candidates for the Prime Minister (PM) post?
Searching for Livni in Google brings up the Wikipedia article about the candidate as the top result, followed by a mix of relevant and not relevant results. Among the first ten results, there is no link to the party website or to Zipi Livni’s personal website. If you specify your search to Zipi Livni (full name vs. just the family name), the results are more relevant, however very few of them are official communication from the campaign and many are not very flattering.
Netanyahu is performing much better here. If you search for just his family name or for his popular full name (Bibi Netanyahu or just Bibi), the first result will be his personal blog, followed by a Wikipedia entry about him, followed by a website commemorating his brother, and then a mixture of relevant website, including a website of his supporters. The most positive for Netanyahu results are yielded when you search for his popular name. If you search for his more official name, Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a slight shift in results (Wikipedia article is coming first), but they are all relevant and contributing to what I can imagine as potential causes of his campaign.
Barak is loosing the race here again. If you search just for his family name, the first two results are related to an international communication company carrying the same name, and only the third result is the Wikipedia entry about the candidate. Other results are a mixture of irrelevant results, some of which are actually about Barack Obama. However, if you specify your search to his full name, Ehud Barak, the results are much better and after the Wikipedia article at the top of the search results, you will actually receive his personal website.
Moving on to Walla, Netanyahu is again leading the pack with yielding the most positive results for his campaign. Whether you search for parts of his formal or popular name, the top results will always containt links to his personal website and to the support website I’ve mentioned above. At the same time, things look not as good for Livni. Searching just for her last name, yields a lot of results, which are rather critical of the candidate. If you focus your search to her full name, the results are slightly better, with the Wikipedia at the top, but there are still enough critical materials, which I am sure Kadima’s campaign would like not to have in the top ten results. For Barak, the situation is slightly better in Walla. Searching just for his family name, yields a mixture of results, some of which are relevant. Searching for his full name, yields similar results to those in Google.
Sorry, for making the MSN summary shorter again, but its results were rather similar to those of Walla. In fact, all the candidates do slightly worse with MSN, as it bring less relevant results and when those are relevant they actually tend to be more critical. All in all, Netanyahu is doing the best with search there, followed by Barak (only if you search for the full name), and then Livni.
In the Israeli political system, you do not vote directly for the PM. You are voting for a party and later the head of the party that leads the formation of a coalition, gets the PM job. This is why I started testing the search with looking for parties and only then for the candidates. Now I would like to talk about the party websites, before I move to talk about those of the candidates.
I start with Kadima, which has a relatively decent and updated website. Although its design seems to be stuck in the late 1990’s when they just started discovering that you can do online slightly more than showing HTML. The website is extremely busy with graphics and not very trivial to navigate. It has an option to watch videos on its homepage and it has a survey (with a question about whether Zipi Livni should declare general election, which was decided a few weeks ago). Besides a rather updated stream of news and static information about the website, the only interactive features on the website are an option to send email and joion the party. Well, I might be exaggerating, because they also allow to download campaign related stuff from the website with the only caveat that it is from the previous election (I think). The entire website is in Hebrew, but there is a link to the Russian version of the website. If click that however, you get a pop-up window saying that the site is under construction.
Likud have just launched a new website. I am certain that just about a week and a half ago, when I first thought about this post, they had a rather horrible website. The new one, however, is really up to date and is rather impressive. It is rather pleasant aesthetically and has a number of 2.0-ish functionality, such as the ability to search for local events, start a blog, etc. A number of Likud members of Knesset have blogs that are linked to from the website. There is not much content there yet and it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Clearly following Obama’s footsteps, they are trying to build a community of supporters at: my.netanyahu.co.il. In fact the main Likud website is now sitting on www.netanyahu.co.il, which I think is an interesting attempt to focus attention on the party’s main political asset. Of course they have information about the party and an option to join it. The highlight, however, is the ability to donate to the party online – something I have never seen in the Israeli politics before. Currently, the website is focused on the municipal election, but from the way it looks and feels it is definitely the currently best built online space in this campaign so far.
It looks like the news about invention of the internet did not really reach the Israeli Labor Party. The most official page for Avoda I could find is a mostly empty page where you can check whether or not you are a member of the party or download a form to join it. That’s it.
Yisrael Beitenu is doing much better than Avoda, but not as good as Likud; probably closer to Kadima. They have a rather static website, which is more pleasant to the eye compared to that of Kadima. The website is mostly about pushing information to its users. It has a rather updated news section and a lot of information about the party. The only interactive feature I spotted was an option to join a mailing list. There were however, a couple of features that I have not seen on the other two websites. First, Yisrael Beitenu attempts to publish the names and ID numbers (equivalent of SSN in the US) of their donors. That is quite transparent, but I am not sure what it does to people’s willingness to contribute and how sustainable this is (there is only information about May 2008 presented on the website). Second, they have rather elaborate versions of the site not just in Hebrew, but also in Russian and in English. This is interesting. While I can understand their willingness to invest in the Russian version of the website (a lot, if not the most, of their supporters are Russian-speakers), but I cannot understand the motivation behind the English version.
If Kadima and Yisrael Beitenu are stuck in late 1990’s, Shas is confusing. On the one hand, when it comes to the website design, it is stuck in the early 1990’s. On the other hand, in terms of functionality, they are almost as good as Likud’s website. It is possible to join a social network on Shas’s website, edit a profile, send and receive messages within the network, and more. Other than that, the website is very long HTML page that has a lot of content about the party, its spiritual/cultural agenda, news, and information about events. The site has quite an extensive multimedia collection and at the same time, it is not available on Saturdays.
To summarize, I was really surprised to see the overhaul Likud’s website went through and the extend to which Shas’s website has embraced the modern technical abilities. At the same time, other parties are really lagging behind. Particularly surprising is the Avoda’s negligence of the internet.
This one is relatively easier as I think Zipi Livni does not have a personal website, so there are only two to look at.
Netanyahu is definitely in the lead here and as I mentioned in the previous section, he just re-launched his entire online presence mimicking Obama’s campaign. It definitely looks impressive and it will be interesting to see how it evolves. To their credit, I have to say that Likud not just channeled their online efforts into a single place, but it also preserved some of the older materials. Netanyahu used to have a blog and a personal website for a while now, and I think many (if not all) of his blog posts made it to the new website.
When it comes to his personal website, Ehud Barakis doing much better than his party. There is actually a decent website with a lot of static information about the candidate. You can become Barak’s supporter and join his mailing list. Weirdly enough, there are fields for a user name and a password on the website, but there is nowhere one can join anything that resembles a social network. They do have a section on the website for announcement for “authorized personnel only”. Whatever that means, it does not support communication with potential voters. Moreover, many of the pages on the website are empty, which creates a feeling that they wanted just to put something out there, without putting enough resources into it.
I started with Facebook. I remember looking at the information about the Israeli network on Facebook and being impressed. Unfortunately, Facebook no longer provides access to networks statistics. Nevertheless, here is the membership count for the various parties I could find:
- Likud: 985 members (and they also have separate pages for the international and the English speaking wings of the party)
- Avoda: 154 members
- Kadima: 149 members
- Yisrael Beitenu: 17 members (another 44 members in their English speaking wing)
- Shas: I could not find any
There are of course more groups focusing on the parties and there as well, Likud is much more represented compared to other parties (even though the discussion is rather polarized). Interestingly, I ran a similar search on a Russian social networking website VKontakte and actually found a couple of groups supporting the following parties:
- Yisrael Beitenu: 107 members
- Likud: 35 members
I didn’t see other parties represented there.
For that category I looked on Facebook. Frankly, I don’t think there is another significant social networking website in Israel, if you do not account for communities formed in places such as Tapuz or Nana for example. Those are more blogging communities, but I may be mistaken.
Since all three candidates have Facebook profiles, we can start with pure numbers of the kind social networks usually care about:
There is not much activity going on the politician’s website, but you can observe clashes among supporters and even some criticism on the discussion boards. I don’t really know what else one can see looking at their profile pages.
One can see a much more colorful picture if they look at the groups arguing in support or against certain candidates. It is quite difficult to say something systematic about these groups but here are some of my unsystematic observations. First, Ehud Barak as a politician is almost non existent in this sphere. Benjamin Netanyahu is coming out of this comparison as the most controversial figure. He has probably the largest amount of groups focusing on him, but those usually have limited membership. Tzipi Livni is giving a “good fight” to Netanyahu in this sphere. She may have fewer groups focusing on her, but those that do are mostly supportive and have relatively large memberships.
Also, with all the personalization, I am not sure I am seeing anything nearing a complete picture. So, I wonder, when you look at how these candidates appear in social networks, what do you see?
Candidates in Spreadable media
I started my search with YouTube. Searching for the candidates’ channels, the only one whom I found present was Netanyahu – at least I think it was his channel. The other two candidates were absent from YoutTube, even though there are many videos focusing on all three. I wonder if there is a reliable way to measure whom users on YouTube favor more among the three candidates. Do you have any idea about the best way to do it?
I also searched Flix, the Israeli version of YouTube. There was no dedicated equivalents of channels and most of the videos posted by various users were captures of TV translations of either speeches and news items or satirical programs. There is very limited user generated content dealing with politics that goes beyond simple power-point-style presentations.
I was not able to locate dedicated party channels on YouTube, but most of the major parties are being mentioned in various videos. You can find items ranging from captured TV performances to user-created content, usually criticizing the parties or their members of the Knesset. Interestingly, looking for Avoda-related content, I saw that two of the party members, Ami Ayalon and Ephraim Sneh, actually have their own YouTube channels. Nothing like this stood for any of the other members of Knesset or party members.
As before, I also searched Flix. It had significantly fewer political videos. I could not find dedicated equivalents of channels owned by the politicians, but there were some channels clearly supporting Netanyahu or Livni. Most of the relevant content on Flix seems to be snapshots of the official speeches of the candidates. There was no Israeli version of Obama girl.
From my unsystematic analysis above, it looks like Likud is currently leading the way with technological innovation in this campaign. Although they just launched their new environment, it already looks promising and I hope other candidates and parties will follow their example. It will be great if this election produce more “new” media innovation in both the technological and the strategic realms. There are of course other parties that are using the online environment for they purposes, but none of them is doing an extraordinarily good job. Anyhow, this is just a beginning of the electoral race in Israel and although the entire election period is only 3 months, a lot can change as we move on.
In the meantime, in the US, Obama seems to continue innovating with technology. His administration “in formation” launched a website for supposedly direct communication with the people. I first read about in Megan’s blog and I share her careful scepticism abot whether or not this direct channel will work and whether ot not it will be actually direct. Nevertheless, there is a lot of interst and some expectations from this initiative and the future of the community created at my.barackobama.com This one will be an extermly interseting to watch.
