Marker – Full Service Digital Agency

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.