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powers of persuasion - overview
Politicians have a lot to persuade us of! Their policies must appear well
founded, coherent, consistent with their other policies, advantageous over the
policies of the opposing parties and meaningful to our individual needs and
aspirations. That's a lot of persuasion to fit into a sound-bite for
traditional print or broadcast media! Putting information online, however,
should be ideally suited to voter persuasion. Well-designed web content is
punchy and easily scanned to find the bits that
interest you most. Then hyperlinks take you directly to more in-depth
information on the topics you select.
There has also been a lot of research done into the principles and
practicalities of online persuasion (for principles see
Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and for practicalities
see Future Now Inc).
Before I started delving too deeply into the party political websites, I
sketched out three ways in which I expected them to be deploying best-practice
in online persuasion:
-
The basics of online persuasion: concise and meaningful overviews of what the
party stands for on all major issues, with information-scent-trails leading to
convincing explanations and justifications of party policies;
-
An integrated approach to persuasion, including:
-
links to external web resources that lend independent and authoritative support
to the claims underpinning policies;
-
regularly updated rebuttals of claims/counter-claims made by the opposing
parties;
-
Access to everything one might want to find out about the party, all with
consistent branding and reinforcing key messages;
-
Use of some of the more advanced persuasion technologies, such as:
-
facilities for content personalisation - e.g. to show a married house-owning
reader with children which policies particularly apply to them;
-
influencing the 'preference construction' of their readers, which cognitive
psychologists have shown to be a powerful way to influence decision-outcomes.
Our analysis of how well the main political sites met my expectations on
persuasiveness will be published over the next 2 weeeks. The first installment,
on the basics of online persuasion is
published today.
Links:
Conservatives;
Labour; Liberal
Democrats