Professional Documents
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FOCUs 27
Young voters
prefer the
human touch
> FROM PAGE 25
amah and see them myself, he
says.
Social marketing expert Anas
Zubedy feels that the political
noise conceals the reality that the
average young person is unaware
of politics and the political leaders.
Anas, who conducted his own
telephone survey, had written
on his blog that his findings
convinced him that the Internet
population would not significantly affect the outcome of the
coming elections.
There are too many distractions out there and politicians
are not seen as cool...as a consequence, the youth just dont
have that drive to fully use the
Internet to catch up on current
affairs, politics in particular, he
concluded.
Social media
observer G. Yeoh
also thinks that
the impact of the
social media will
not be as significant as expected.
I dont think
the majority of voters in
Malaysia have
access to social
media. The urban DAVID LIAN
voters yes, but
not the nonurban voters.
Its simplistic to
claim that just because its the
first time that this tool is being
used and its new. I have seen
in the last GE social media being
used in various ways by young
Malaysians wanting to make a
difference, on their own without
binding themselves to any political faction.
Yeoh observes that while
younger politicians are definitely
revving up their presence on
social media, not all politicians
are using it to their advantage,
which is a shame as it is good as
a direct connection to their constituents.
It really allows for people to
get in touch with them directly.
Its nice to be able to tweet with
your MP because too often they
are placed up on the pedestal. Its
nice to know that politicians are
human too.
Ironically, he points out, that is
the key the human touch.
He says it does not work when
the politicians falsely inflate the
number of followers, get their
assistants to tweet for them or
worse, not tweet at all.
That is why politicians like
Khairy Jamaluddin, Tony Pua,
Abdul Rahman Dahlan, Nurul
Izzah and Saifuddin Abdullah
have many followers, he says.
They tweet themselves and
the tweets are real. And sometimes they make mistakes too.
People can tell when another
person is real. People dont follow each other on Twitter or
Facebook just so they can consume the same old messages
churned out by strategists.
If used as
a one-way
street,
social
media
users are quick to
turn off and tune
out.
31 March 2013