Ontario web campaign training for fed election?

I think that the Liberals will need to hire some of those angels on TV to enable Dion to have a second chance! It will need a miracle to keep his own comrades from nipping at his heels and destroying his campaign. Even though the polls are not that bad and do not show a Conservative majority the media seem to already have decided that Dion is hopeless egged on by Liberal insiders still hurting from being unable to crown the correct leader.


Ontario election web campaign training for nastier upcoming federal race: expert


TORONTO - Ontario's incumbent Liberals may have gotten the drop on their Conservative rivals on the online campaign front, but their federal counterparts will need a different cyberspace strategy if they're to bring down Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an expert in Internet politics says.

The web tactics of Premier Dalton McGuinty's war room - fomenting voter doubt about Conservative Leader John Tory - likely won't work for federal leader Stephane Dion, who is himself already at the heart of a similar debate, said Ryerson University professor Greg Elmer.

"(The Liberal) strategy in Ontario has really been to frame the debate and highlight the debate around their chief opponent," Elmer said.

"It's a much harder thing to do federally, because Dion himself has admitted that the Tories have done that to him - he's been kind of 'caricature-ized' as a kind of wooden character."

The federal Liberal war room, he said, will have a dual challenge on its hands: reverse Dion's negative image, while at the same time moving the focus back to Harper and calling his values into question.

But trying to "build up their own man" as a "likable guy" who voters can connect with can be a tough task on the Internet, he added.

"The Internet has proven to be effective as a negative tool, largely, to point at the other fellow and say, 'Look at all these terrible things about him,"' Elmer said.

"It's been no way near as effective as a way of playing up the positives of your leader or of your message."

In Ontario, the Liberals appear to have done a superior job of capitalizing on Tory's flaws, Elmer said, citing the example of a YouTube video that captured him accidentally adding Spanish to his awkward French at a news conference.

Another video, which emerged a week before the campaign began in earnest, featured Tory referring to the University of Ottawa as the "U of Zero" in a lighthearted moment with a young voter.

The ensuing controversy was quickly snuffed out, but it ended up altering his campaign strategy, putting handlers on the defensive and impairing their ability to showcase their leader the way they wanted, Elmer said.

"Staffers around the leader put him into a much more scripted campaign mode" - the approach McGuinty took from the very beginning, Elmer said.

"(McGuinty's) really limited his exposure to both voters and the media so he's run a very, very controlled scripted campaign. Tory didn't, and directly after that video came out, he shifted and mirrored the premier's campaign style."

Most other unflattering images and sound bites of the leaders have come from the podium or talk radio, Elmer said.

And in the last week, he added, more and more radio clips are appearing on YouTube as the war room experts try to capitalize on those increasingly rare "gotcha" moments.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Conservatives have been running a more positive, less strategic Internet campaign, Elmer said.

Their more successful projects included a playful Simpsons parody and the recently launched website daltonmcguinty.ca - a mock-up of the premier's personal website that focuses instead on his broken promises, rather than his accomplishments.

Known as "domain name hijacking" or "cyber squatting," the tactic itself is controversial, even if the content of the Conservative postings is not, Elmer said.

Elmer, whose Infoscape Research Lab has been tracking debate in the blogosphere and on the Internet since before last year's federal Liberal leadership convention, said he expects the federal campaign to be "much nastier."

"We have already had Dion refer to the prime minister's weight and the way he dresses, and the NDP attacked Dion immediately after he was elected as an out-of-touch academic," he said.

"I'm assuming that the next federal election is going to be a lot more colourful."

Elmer said he also expects to hear a lot more from bloggers, who have played only a small role in the highly "controlled" Ontario campaign, with no engagement with the candidates.

He said the blogosphere was far more active during the federal Liberal leadership race and during last month's federal byelections in Quebec.

Citing the recent launch of a Facebook site calling for a united federal Liberal party, Elmer suggested infighting within the party will likely make for plenty more debate online.

As for the federal Conservatives which, Elmer said, have run a tightly controlled communications department since taking office, it remains to be seen how they use the web to disseminate information.

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