Decision ’08 — New Zealand Political Party Online Ratings

The eyes of the world will be on the US elec­tions on Tues­day, however there is another elec­tion happen­ing this week here in New Zealand, if you live here you might have heard about it. I decided to put my geek hat on, and look at how the three main parties (based on current polling), National Party, Labour Party and the Green Party, stack up if you look at purely their online presence.

Deci­sion 08 Polit­i­cal Party Online Ratings (click to enlarge)

I have put together this ratings table which looks at the follow­ing areas:

Search Engine Optimisation

An impor­tant part of any online strat­egy, but partic­u­larly impor­tant as you want to have high visi­bil­ity within Google (90% market share in NZ) as this is where most of your traf­fic should come from.

Search Engine Advertising

Pay per click adver­tis­ing via Google AdWords would help supple­ment their traf­fic and exposure.

Site Design

Partic­u­lar atten­tion to the home­page, as this is their best oppor­tu­nity to try to engage with voters.

Social Network­ing

How did they do on You Tube and Face­book? It doesn’t look like anyone has got onto Twit­ter yet.

RSS

RSS should be the best way to keep updated on what was happen­ing and the content they are publishing.

Here are some of the other facts and figures I found along the way.

Google Trends Predic­tion of the Election

This is the index of search traf­fic on Google for the differ­ent polit­i­cal parties by name, and leader. The top graph looks at search traf­fic, the bottom graph looks at mentions in the news.

The fact that Labour and the Green Party are so close is some­what interesting.

As you can see, rela­tively speak­ing, the inter­est in the other lead­ers, apart from John Key and Helen Clark is limited, in fact, there isn’t enough data for Google to draw a line on the graph.

Face­book

Who is winning in the world of social networks?

If Face­book friends were repre­sen­ta­tive of the voting public, then John Key is substan­tially more popu­lar than the incum­bent leader.

ACT vs Green looks very differ­ent on Face­book than in the polls.

Winston Peters has no Face­book Page or Profile, and the Winston Peters Appre­ci­a­tion Group is not exactly going that well, with a mere 32 members.

Greens.org.nz Home Page

I have singled this out, as the worst home page. An exam­ple is the big green box for “Our Acheive­ments” which is completely blank! Whilst I appre­ci­ate the self-criticism, surely you guys have done some­thing as trusted coali­tion part­ners for all these years?

I think it was just disap­point­ing that they didn’t really apply the great photog­ra­phy they have used in the bill­boards on their website. I imag­ine they just ran out of time and money unfortunately.

They do have the best blog though.

Conclu­sion

My conclu­sion, and bear in mind much of this was based on subjec­tive opin­ion, was that the National Party has the best over­all online pres­ence. The qual­ity, quan­tity and reach of content is surpris­ingly good, and not what I would have expected. The fact that you can leave a comment on John Key’s blog, but not on Helen Clark’s “diary” also gave them points for being open to partic­i­pa­tion and online discussion.