Today I was having morning tea with a couple of supporters, when someone suggested, “You should campaign on Facebook!”. In a moment of absolute geekiness, I responded with “lol”, in spoken conversation.
I’ve been running this advert on Facebook for a couple of weeks now, it’s been the most cost effective part of my campaign. It’s resulted in three hundred impressions and has cost me a sum total of 0.79c. I also launched this Facebook group some time ago. For a large part of this campaign it seemed that I was the only candidate to do even the bare minimum of campaigning online. Fortunately there are now a few others.
If you have a moment spare, I’d encourage you to check out the Facebook profiles of my council candidate rivals, Julie Emmins, David Brown and Dean Freeman. Julie Emmins also has this campaign website, and David Brown has this Facebook group.
Online social networking is a large part of the lives of a demographic who are traditionally disengaged from local politics. I hope that more candidates will do something to bring their campaigns to young voters online.
Update: The Border Mail published this article on Saturday, which has some “interesting” quotes from yours truly. What it lacks in accuracy it makes up for by having my name in it. 
Speaking of accuracy, the captions on the photos are the wrong way around.
Ed Foulston has registered a facebook account and launched this website. Dean Freeman has launched this facebook group.
Further Update: Jenny Hansuka now has this blog and this facebook profile. Of course you can’t access the profile, it’s set to friends only.