OnOffBeirut

During the round of parliamentary elections of 2005, online presence of candidates was pretty scarce.  Their use of the Internet as a medium of communication was limited to internal communication within the Election Team, if any.  The Internet was even superseded by fax, phone calls, and hand-delivered messages in some cases.

Four years later, it is time for the 2009 elections and the approach of candidates to Internet and social media is different this time around.  A lot has happened over the course of the last four years in terms of national and regional politics, world economics,…More specific to the topic of social media, Internet penetration rates in Lebanon have increased over the last four years especially with the introduction of different forms of broadband (in its limited form), Facebook adoption rate in Lebanon grew tremendously, and blogs discussing Lebanon have been popular, especially during the turbulent occurrences over the last few years.

Politicians have recognized the importance of an online presence and have attempted to participate in Social Media during this round of elections.  The majority of candidates have registered domains in their names, created a website that hosts their election term program, activities and TV / radio appearances leading up to the election,…The candidates have referenced their websites on print advertisements such as street ads. Sample screenshots from some websites are included in the appendix. Some political parties embraced social media better than others.  A helping factor is the fact that they were not in power or didn’t own their own tv / radio station.  They resorted to social media to express their opinions and put them out there.  Another helping factor is that their followers are immigrants living abroad but still keeping in touch with the Lebanese political scene.

Participation using Facebook took place via groups, pages, and advertising within the Facebook platform.  Groups and pages reflected the bio of the politician, election program, event, interview announcements, pictures, some videos, and comments from supporters.  Advertising within the Facebook platform was quite effective in bringing traffic and promoting the candidate’s pages, especially when the electoral candidates have chosen images that are inline with their brand-awareness efforts that they are already doing offline.  Note that a lot of Facebook groups / pages have also been created by supporters (usually younger) and are not the official group.  Such sites become semi-official especially in the cases when it would be the only online group for a candidate with already little online presence.

Junk email messages announcing the sites or a TV / radio appearance, promotional festival, or political program are popular among candidates.  Although junk email is not exactly social media and is more on the dark side; however, it has communication outreach with spam databases specifically targeting Lebanese locally and abroad.  Messages are being sent in Arabic, English, and French.

In similar format, text messaging (SMS) was being used for the same form of announcements above.  This is more popular among candidates as it is easier to implement, addresses the offline section of the voters, has a bigger outreach, and is within the grasp of personal understanding of the candidate him / herself (unlike the Internet counter part).

Microblogging (mainly in the form of twitter) still has not hit mainstream yet despite its success worldwide.  There are Lebanese twitter users and followers; however, they are in the form of groups that are disconnected from each other.  To really benefit from microblogging there has to be some form of collective intelligence and collective collaboration.  Unfortunately, we are not there yet.  Concerning the elections of 2009, you can see a few twitter accounts for candidates; however, they are accounts created by fans and not quite active: amingemayel (23 updates, following 33, followers 23); walidjumblat (0 updates, following 20, followers 12); forceslebanese (0 updates, following 0, followers 23); lebanese_forces (0 updates, following 0, followers 31); tayyarheadlines (275 updates, following 0, followers 42).

The usual news sites that are available online have introduced subsections for the elections; however, they are mostly informative and not collaborative in nature.  Examples include: LBCI Parliamentary Elections lbcnews.net; Naharnet Elections elections.naharnet.com; L’Orient Le Jour www.lorientlejour.com/elections/

In terms of user participation online, users are taking their own initiatives and using social media to communicate with each other, whether friends or foes.  The prominent example is the user generated content contributed to Demotix Lebanon Elections section www.demotix.com/lebanonelections, as well as the recently launched Sharek961.org. Demotix is a citizen-journalism website that markets user-generated content and photographs from freelance journalists and amateurs.  It has over 5,000 members, in 110 countries.  There is a sub section specializing in the upcoming elections in Lebanon.  With sharek961.org, users send eye-witness reports on election-based incidents via SMS to +96171189118, twitter (@sharek961), email (sharek961@sharek961.org), or an online form on their website.  It is based on the ushahidi.com crisis reporting platform that has been used in the AlJazeera “War on Gaza” website labs.aljazeera.net/warongaza/ that covered the activity in Gaza of January 2009 as well as in the Indian elections of 2009 (votereport.in).  Outside Demotix and Sharek961, users are publishing their own content to their blogs, twitter, facebook, podcasts,…content revolves around documentation of ad campaigns throughout Lebanon, events they participated in, speeches,…Moreover, there are lots of online images among users that take the existing ad campaign of a candidate or political party and manipulates it to the benefit of others.  Offline, there are volunteers with the Lebanese Association for Democratic Election (LADE) www.ladeleb.org that will try to monitor the lections as close as possible for irregularities on election day. They have volunteers from different organizations including the Lebanese American University (LAU)  www.lau.edu.lb/news-events/news/archive/lau_students_step_up_to_protec/

As a wrap-up,

The parliamentary elections of 2009 in Lebanon have seen an increased online presence by candidates.  However, it is only online presence not participation and voter engagement. The use of social media was more of a complimentary approach to their existing campaign and not a core part of it.  When on TV / radio interviews, festivals,…they rarely referred to the website or Facebook page to invite people to conduct / communicate / contribute / review / comment.  Moreover, online presence of candidates is more of an appeal to a younger demographic, and to show they are “up-to-date”.  While going through the different sites there is an overall feeling that the candidate personally (and to a lesser extent his election team) are not well-versed in Internet literacy and have not taken the full advantage social media could offer them.

It would be interesting to observe the future of these sites over the next few years, for both those who won and those who lost.  Will they continue to update the site with works performed by the elected candidate ?  For the candidates who lost, will they take down their site, ignore it, keep it as it is until the hosting contract expires, let it sleep for now until the next elections come up in four years, update it with future activities he / she is doing with the communities ?

From the point of view of user generated content, historically our use and embrace of social networks in Lebanon is during times of adversity.  You see the number of podcasts go up and frequency of updates increase tremendously, and then once the incident is over, it just dies out completely.  There are also lots of message circulations via internal mass emails among friends (mostly before blogging picked up), blogs, and to a wider extent Facebook.  With the growing availability of a (limited) broadband connection, growing of the Lebanese Blogosphere, and the uptake of microblogging, the user generated content related to Lebanon is posed to grow significantly over the next few years.

Prepared in Beirut, Lebanon on June 4, 2009

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