I realise that you’re coming from a Digital Media background / angle and unfortunately the pricing structures differ between local campaigns for the council and a commercial enterprise. My biggest problem with miCandidate is not particular the idea but the fee structure. It is entirely out of context for the domain. If we start charging politicians the `going rate’ well I see the need for more brown envelopes as they’re certainly not going to be getting any pay rises in the current climate.

The traffic may be misleading as I’d imagine all those interns they’ve got hired are doing some testing as they go. Hell, I won’t put it past them to hire Chinese gold diggers as click monkeys given the tone and approach they have already adopted.

I have told quite a number of candidates to avoid this service and will continue to do so. It needs to re-evaluate its pricing structure and the track record of its management does leave many many questions. 1000 euros saved and spent on posters or leaflets when combined with a blogger or wordpress site will garner the candidate more votes.

Free one-time-setup plugins on WordPress (which the site designer can turn on and the user can ignore) will provide full integration with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and a thousand other social networking sites.

Wordpress provides an equally good “one stop shop” (arguably a much better one), and gives the candidate far more control over their data and presence.

To explain my leaning towards MiCandidate (just) over a normal site, the best way for a politician to establish an online presence as you know is to use the social media tools, and update the content on an on going basis like flickr / facebook / twitter / YouTube etc as well as a hub (site for main content and contact info). This requires a lot of management time, and some skills which many digital agencies provide. However, I think it’s fair to say, many politicians wouldn’t spend the money on agencies or the time each tool requires. If they do choose MiCandidate, then they would have to interact with the various social media communities, but at least this is one service which is aiming to provide all a one stop shop and easy management.

Again, I agree that your findings show a complete lack of understanding of how to use Twitter and that nearly all of their services aren’t perfect – but I think it’s a strong idea, and maybe with a longer beta period where all feedback would be considered would have helped them.

They are certainly getting traffic – a ‘hacker’ informs me the site has received 1,100 hits so far today!

Richard

I too would commend an Irish company attempting get politicians involved in social media, if they go about it the right way as a company (not even as a tech company). Even discounting their complete lack of understanding as to the way social media operates, the way they operate as a company is questionable – see The Irish Times false claim.

Thanks for the comment.

I commend the attempt of an Irish company to provide politicans with a social media platform to reach a mass audience, even if there is evidence of a lack of understanding of both ‘politics’ and ‘social media tools highlighted above’.

You’re analysis darkens the work of the micandidate people more so than it does the micandidate service. In answer to your question, I would just about lean towards advising a politician to sign up to a micandidate pro account over having a website made.

One had to wonder about the content and if it is being made up or supplied by candidate’s. Here is a great one from Limerick (http://www.micandidate.eu/candidate.aspx?idcandidate=2905) on Jim Long

– Interesting Fact: I have a very keen interest in people watching. I like television and holidays in Kerry. –

It reads like this was put in by an intern, or possibly a Junior cert student!

I’m glad the political grapevine has both major parties not supplying candidate details to miCandidate. I hear that both phones in Mount Street are being bombarded by those interns who have gotten the numbers of higher ups. Seems that it would be a quiet day when the miCandidate interns don’t place at least 5 calls to said people requesting the information. I can’t believe that they don’t simply trawl the website and manually add it, especially given the shocking number of interns / monkeys that they seem to have involved in this scheme. I think the COOP or internship offices in the Dublin Universities might need to do some explaining about this down the line.