Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic

YouTube: A Political Advertising Tool? A Case Study of the Use of YouTube in the Campaign for the European Parliament Elections 2009

Political campaigns are made to attract the attention from citizens. The beginning of its adaption is linked to the appearance of the social media and user-generated content. Since the number of users of social network sites in Europe constantly grows, 2009 was the first time that these websites were used in political marketing purposes for the European Parliament elections. This is an exploratory study of the nature and extent of video-based social media, studied through the content analysis of YouTube videos created for the electoral campaign for the 2009 European Parliament elections by 13 political parties from four EU states. Results have shown the specificities of political advertising on the YouTube, a raising interest in social media among citizens in Europe, and the development of this way of campaigning.

Communicating with voters by blogs? Campaigning for the 2009 European Parliament elections

Following the rise in use of online communication in electoral campaigns throughout the world, this article deals with the use of blogs by politicians in Europe. Through the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, it analyzes blog posts written by the European Parliament incumbents running for the European Parliament elections in 2009, from four different EU states and ideological backgrounds, and at the same time the four largest political groups in the European Parliament. The purpose of the study is to reveal the campaign strategy and dominant discourses through the analysis of the format, style and appeals. The findings reveal the differences in discourses between four political blogs, which result from the different use of language and appeals.

European Parliament Online: Identifying the European Parliament's 2009 Online Communication Strategy

The objective of this paper is to chart the boundaries of the developing phenomenon of the use of information and communication technologies to support politics by large political organizations such as the European Parliament through the analysis of the online strategy of the European Parliament in its campaign for widening participation in the 2009 European Parliament elections. For the first time, during the electoral campaign, the European Parliament decided to lead its own campaign to raise awareness among citizens and increase turnout, and constructed its campaign on an official website and on five social network sites. The authors have concentrated on the European Parliament website, as well as on its profile on three most used social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Since it is difficult to make a deeper comparison between these different online platforms, the authors have tested them on different communicative functions and campaign elements. Through the use of computer-mediated discourse analysis, this descriptive and explorative study has tried to discover the dynamics of the campaign, the reasons for choosing a specific platform for a particular part of the campaign, and the possibility of complementariness between them.