Political

Spanish politicians try to woo voters over WhatsApp

WhatsApp

Interesting news from Spain:

With just months left before municipal elections in Spain, Gutiérrez Iglesias, the People’s party mayor of Brunete, near Madrid, has taken his campaign to the next frontier: WhatsApp.

“It’s been about a month since we went around giving every resident my phone number,” said Gutiérrez Iglesias, who has headed the small town of about 10,000 people since 2011. After taking to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, WhatsApp – a smartphone application that allows users to send and receive free texts to anyone in their contact list – felt like the final frontier, he said.

Since launching the campaign “Call me or write [to] me on my phone!”, he checks the app on his phone at all hours, responding to most messages within minutes. Messages stream in all day; from as early as 6am and sometimes until 1am…

Spanish politicians’ embrace of WhatsApp has been driven by necessity, said Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, a communication consultant, as WhatsApp has made it’s way on to 99% of the phones in Spain the past four years…

Campaigns by the Socialists and Catalonia’s Republican Left have capitalised on the app’s popularity in a passive way, inviting supporters to register for updates via WhatsApp.

The challenge with WhatsApp, as with any other new communications option for politicians, is to make it scale successfully. As I explained in Does it scale? there are simply too many voters for 1-to-1 communication between a politician and their voters to be of more than marginal impact.

‘Does it scale?’ is the question that explains which political campaign technologies take-off

Once you get beyond the smaller local council wards, there are simply too many voters for candidates and politicians to be able to do one-to-one, retail-style politics. more

Even with only 10,000 people in his town (very small compared to a British Parliamentary constituency and not that different from a typical ward size in the UK), Iglesias’s description of a stream of messages from 6am through to 1am highlights the problem.

WhatsApp has some interesting broadcast options and it’s there that its future lies in politics, just as with Facebook it’s the ability to put out a message to a large volume of people, with some interaction options on the side, that’s central to its political impact.

Hat-tip: epolitics.com.

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