Get Out the Vote 2.0 – West Hollywood
February 23, 2007 |
The City of West Hollywood has taken a Web 2.0 approach to increasing voter turnout for their upcoming municipal elections in March; they've turned to YouTube to disseminate voting information. The five-minute video is available on both YouTube as well as on the West Hollywood website at http://www.weho.org/elections, and details virtually everything that voters would want or need to know about the upcoming City Council elections.
The city has 23,000 registered voters, and the video was produced by the City Clerk's Division. West Hollywood City Clerk Tom West says in the press release:
"It is important that we make information about voting in municipal elections as accessible as possible. By utilizing YouTube to carry the message about voter information, as well as the City's website, we hope to encourage more people to turn out to the polls on March 6, 2007."
The video details the names of candidates, as well as providing the URLs where voters can find out additional information, such as where to register, and how to find out if they have already registered.
The use of YouTube to disseminate information for voting at the city level is certainly new, and for other cities to use this same approach, it will still depend upon traditional media outlets to convey the information. While more information can be put out in a five-minute YouTube video than can in traditional advertising, until this approach is commonplace, it's going to take newspapers and news spots on television news to drive viewers to the information. The City of West Hollywood has already set up a user profile to add more videos, but at the same time, they've also disabled embedding, one of the most crucial ways that YouTube videos are shared.
It's great that government officials are looking for new ways to communicate, but until they gain a full understanding of the medium, it may not gain the audience they are hoping for.
Source: Business Wire
