François Bayrou’s Online Campaign: Booting the MoDem.

If you are a bored gamer in search of the latest entertainment experience, drop your controller, turn off Call of Duty and go campaign for François Bayrou.

You read that correctly. Centrist candidate François Bayrou’s new campaign website was released on February 7th and it is the first with a gaming twist. With the release of an iPhone app the day before, this is an attempt by the MoDem candidate to boost his online credentials, prompting French magazine Marianne to ask whether Bayrou is a geek.

Screenshot of François Bayrou's iPhone app

The new website emulates the point-system feature of many social media sites and applications like Foursquare (note that François Bayrou himself is not a Foursquare user but that you can check into his campaign headquarters). Instead of badges, however, MoDem sympathizers are rewarded with ‘decibels’ when they ‘make some noise’ online in favor of the candidate. Twitter users immediately picked up on the similarities.

Quand François #Bayrou se lance dans le #gaming pour sa nouvelle plateforme web, ça donne ça : http://t.co/02Rv617P

— Cécile Jandau (@Cecile_Jandau) February 8, 2012

Presidential candidate #Bayrou launches a new online platform inspired by #Obama campaign, video games and #foursquare: http://t.co/3ktR2NEv

— Rémi Noyon (@RemiJDN) February 7, 2012

This is not Bayrou’s first incursion into the social media world. Instead of announcing his candidacy on television or in print, he hosted a ‘twinterview’ on Twitter, an innovative but complicated exercise where users were asked to tweet questions to him (the event was closed to the press). François Bayrou is also very present on Facebook and Google +.

Screenshot of Bayrou.fr

Bayrou’s web campaign manager, Matthieu Lamarre, is striving to portray his man as a tech-savvy web user who is using social media to connect with ordinary French people. But the real man behind the scenes is Lamarre himself, who has multiplied media appearances to explain and promote Bayrou’s web strategy for the presidential elections. In the following CFJ (Centre de Formation des Journalistes, a Paris based journalism school) interview, for instance, we learn that Bayrou was an early-adopter of Google+ in its beta phase (see below for another interview):

Lamarre does a good job of stressing his candidate’s web-friendliness (see for example this France Info radio interview), and unlike other campaigns he smartly distances Bayrou’s web strategy from Barack Obama’s. He emphasizes that it makes no sense to copy what was done four years ago – as many candidates are doing- because the online differences between 2008 and 2012 are staggering. Overall, the 500 000 euros invested in Bayrou’s web campaign seem to be well spent, especially for Bayrou’s unique, slick magazine style website and despite criticism of the iPhone app’s unoriginality or of the new ‘gaming’ system’s lack of concrete incentives for action. So far, François Bayrou’s web strategy is a #win.

More :

– A Poligeek interview with Matthieu Lamarre: