Social Media Election Prowress: Rudd vs Abbott

Who is the more social media savvy leader in the current Australian Federal election campaign? Rudd or Abbott? Interesting question, so I set about answering it…

As the election looms closer, both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott have stepped up their efforts on social media.

After the successful Kevin07 election campaign, which cleverly leveraged social platforms, PM Kevin Rudd is again stepping it up with a flurry of social media activity. According to the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation, PM Kevin Rudd outperforms Tony Abbott on social media with almost twice the number of mentions. Additionally, PM Kevin Rudd has nearly 10 times more Twitter followers than Tony Abbott.

This is impressive and would seem telling, if not for the fact that PM Kevin Rudd had a larger social media following to start with.

So there we have it. PM Kevin Rudd, although not necessarily popular in and of himself, is the more popular social media leader. Does this mean the majority will vote for him? Not necessarily. Especially not when we take into consideration that in addition to the usual Labor, Democrat, (Sex) and Green parties, there are also the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts, Bullet Train for Australia and Wikileaks Party registered, amongst other enticing options: http://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/party_registration/Registered_parties/.

I’m leaning toward the Coke in the Bubblers Party myself! What about you? A Social Media party run completely on-line, might be a future winner- one cannot say for sure with the rapid advances and expansions being made in technology! It could be like Daft Punk the masked duo, where one day we may not know who our leader truly is at all since he/she will be nothing but an on-line presence- a virtual PM!