Green Party AGM

Queen’s Birthday Weekend was also the weekend the Green Party held their annual conference. As one would expect, there were a number of policy announcements, free doctors visits for up to 18 year olds and a change from the ETS to a Carbon Tax system. There was a comprehensive social media campaign built around the conference. Not just to support the policy announcements but to also push the Green Party as part of an alternative government.

There are a few things I want to talk about. Firstly, with both policy announcements, the Greens once again live streamed them. They have already done this at least once before, it is a great system for making these events more accessible, while also providing a way to circumvent what they see as a media predisposition against them.

Will other parties start to use live streaming as part of their policy announcement process? Or will they shy away from it, due to the inability to control what might go out?

As well as live streaming the policy announcements. Through out the weekend the Green account posted a series of images of Green candidates enjoying the conference. This helped me find the accounts of a couple of Green candidates that are not listed on their website. For candidates with limited profiles, actually getting mentioned by the party account, during a high profile period is going to help build their following. Most likely only among party supporters, but it is a start.

Finally, we also have the graphics the Greens produced. As is to be expected from the Greens, over all the production quality is extremely high.  Two of them focus on tying in the image of the New Zealand that we all know and love, rugged nature and summer batches. They are both aimed at pushing the idea of what is to be lost if the Green policies are not adopted.

My personal view is that the second one, looking over the cliff, is a little heavy on words, but it isn’t as bad as Labour’s word heavy attempt.

The strange thing is, on the same weekend, the Greens went to the other extreme as well, posting an image that had pretty much no text on it at all. Now as a graphic tweeted from the party account, this makes sense. However if someone takes the image and uses it somewhere else, there is no message attached to it.

I am not a fan of huge amounts of text on a infographic, but if you are going to do it, this is how to do it. Clean, simple background, with easy to read text.

I am not total sold on the image they have used of Russel. He comes across a bit stern, with a slight cold tone? But that is just me being a little nit picky.

Over all the Greens have done a good job running social media as a key part of their AGM. It hasn’t come across as a second thought. If we look at the images of candidates they posted, it looks like they have used something like Instagram to help overcome the  inherent down sides of cell phone images.