Short Study: Kurt Beck has no friends - Politics and the Web 2.0 in Germany
With Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org, one of Germanys leading bloggers, I published a short study on Politics and the Web 2.0 in Germany (PDF, german) today.
Our key findings were: German politicians and parties are yet unable to adapt online campaigning techniques such as established in the US or France for example. Some hope seems to lie in YouTube activities, but neither none of the parties nor the leading politicians has a MySpace profile. Some party groups do exist on StudiVZ, the leading german facebook copycat, and on Facebook itself.
If you are interested, I could translate some more of the findings. Leave a comment and I will try.
3 responses so far
Very interesting study! Are you going to follow up this study in the future?
From a broader perspective, it would also be quite fascinating to study the use of the Web 2.0 for the upcoming European elections. Reaching voters Europe-wide through these new means will most probably be a matter of great interest for transnational political groups, don’t you think?
I’m going to write follow-ups every three months on this issue (at least, thats the way we planned to do it).
I’m not sure whether we/I’m are going to focus on the elections for european parliament as well. Since it’s going to be a new data set, it will cause a lot of work (so in fact: it’s undecided yet).
Something I found during research for my “Tracking the EP elections” series: http://manifesto2009.pes.org/en/debate/post/622