Tweets and Timelines for Nicolas Sarkozy’s Official Campaign Launch

[EDIT] French newspaper Le Monde just published a similar article on its website with Reuters, it has good details and links: check it out!

France’s worst kept secret was finally outed last night when Nicolas Sarkozy officially announced his candidacy on TF1. But we are not interested in that. We’re interested in this:

Welcome to Twitter @NicolasSarkozy. Here's a pic of President Obama mtg with President Sarkozy in the Oval Office: pic.twitter.com/dPIxOqa8

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) February 15, 2012

Merci @whitehouse pour ce chaleureux message de bienvenue - NS

— Nicolas Sarkozy (@NicolasSarkozy) February 16, 2012

To see how Nicolas Sarkozy is finally taking the social media ride, check out the screencast below. In it, I do not delve into the recent polemic about whether or not Facebook closely cooperated with the Sarkozy campaign but not with other candidates to create his new Timeline: Frédéric Martel from L’Express broke the story here and there are more explanations here.

More :

– The official announcement on TF1:

– LCI/TF1: Presidential election: the web campaign knows no crisis.

The Internet has fully imposed itself as a tool for the electoral promotion of presidential candidates. Thus, the web campaign of the 2012 elections should see spending increase compared to previous ones.

– Ouest France: Presidential campaign: Twitter, Facebook…what role for social networks in the campaign?, interview with Arnaud Mercier, political scientist and communications professor at Lorraine University.

The fact remains that if we stick to what happened in 2007, we are led to believe that what takes place on social networks only has a potential impact if it is relayed by traditional media. (Arnaud Mercier)

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:

François Hollande: Flour Power Gone Viral

One of many parodies after the incident.

Presidential campaigns aren’t always a piece of cake, especially in an age when every mistake, slip of the tongue and gaffe instantly go viral online. Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande‘s – culinary – mishap is yours to discover on my first Storify by clicking on the image below.

Screenshot of François Flour-Bombed, an Aurelien Breeden Storify

The whole flour incident is of little consequence on the overall elections, but it shows how the Internet coupled with social media enables rapid-response reactions to any tiny stumble, on both sides. It is as easy for opponents of François Hollande to quickly build a Flash-based game ridiculing him as it is for his sympathizers to spread footage of their champion reacting to the event. All in all, the speed with which this kind of story goes viral means that except for the truly polemic or personal ones (think “Casse-toi pov’ con” or “sale mec“), most of these “political” events are over in a 24-hour news cycle.

N.B: Storify has a built-in export tool in order to embed creations in WordPress. I have tried it mutliple times, but to no avail. If you have any tips or solutions to this problem, please comment! 

Welcome !

© xkcd

Welcome to Geeking the Elysée!

In this blog, I aim to analyze the digital aspect of the 2012 presidential elections in France. How do the candidates and their campaigns use the Internet and new technologies? How do they envision these digital possibilities in their platforms? Who is a geek, and who is left behind?

In addition to the blog, I regularly tweet about French politics (you can see my Twitter feed and follow me on the widget below).

It is important to keep in mind that this is an entirely new project – a sandbox for testing and prying. Text, audio, video, embeds, links, graphs: nothing is off limits. Your suggestions and tips on what (free) tools to use and how to use them are welcome!

Which brings us to a second important aspect: interactivity. Feedback is crucial, especially if it helps me become a better blogger, and, ultimately, a better journalist. Please comment (but don’t feed the trolls).

So which politicians are masters of the web and which ones get tangled in it? Who supports HADOPI and who will abolish it? Who is at the forefront of online campaigning and who is still a noob?

Geek the Elysée with me, and you’ll find out.