Political Parties Discover New Campaigning Platforms in Social Media - IT Job Board

By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor

The political parties are getting tech savvy and using new mediums to carry out campaigns. But their target voters, IT professionals, still rely on the mainstream media to follow the election campaign, stated a new survey of IT professionals by The IT Job Board.

It could be the faith in the traditional media such as print and television that is attracting the IT professionals. Political parties are engaging a younger audience by becoming more Web savvy and using Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert) effectively, feel 70 percent of respondents. However, whilst they advocate a greater use of these sites by the Parties, the majority of respondents prefer to read newspapers and online news and follow the debates on TV (68 percent), the report states.

Alex Farrell, managing director of The IT Job Board said, "Although IT professionals are users of social networking sites, they still prefer to engage in a combination of online and more traditional offline mediums to follow the election campaign. However, online mediums are growing fast in popularity and social networking sites are playing an important role in information gathering," stated Alex Farrell.

But there is a flip side to this whole story. Eighty percent said they did not believe what they were reading on Twitter and in online forums whilst they recognised clear advantages of using social networking including gaining instant news updates, reading diverse viewpoints and interacting in live discussion. The consensus was that news sites written by a third party are not subject to any direct agenda from the main political parties, states the report.

Recently, the company released another report, which stated that there are currently over 21,000 jobs on http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk, this represents a 16 percent increase quarter on quarter. In the first quarter of this year, IT manager and IT support roles represented the highest proportion of jobs on site. Contract positions have seen a significant shift, with an increase of 54 percent from the start of the year to the end of March.

(source: http://business-solutions.tmcnet.com/topics/business-solutions/articles/83953-political-parties-discover-new-campaigning-platforms-social-media.htm)