Labour aims to woo Facebook generation

POLITICAL parties in Ireland have made noises and vague gestures about capturing the so-called Bebo and Facebook generation in Ireland without embracing the technology or the medium.

That will change tomorrow when the Labour Party’s first conference under leader Eamon Gilmore kicks off in Wexford.

For in a “big bang” effort, every moment and nuance and debate and argument of the conference will be available in a variety of different formats on the web, with a range of impressive — and cutting-edge — online events.

The entire conference will be available on a livestream using the Ustream channel (Ustream.tv is the live equivalent of YouTube).

“This is the first time that Ustream has been used by an Irish political party,” the party said.

In addition, there will be an online question and answer sessions with key Labour representatives, including deputy leader Joan Burton, health spokeswoman Jan O’Sullivan, commuter spokesman Dominic Hannigan and housing spokesman Ciaran Lynch.

Online Q&A sessions have become a staple of party conferences in Britain and have been used extensively by Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the US.

Invariably, the videos of all the key speeches will be uploaded onto YouTube, and all photographs of the proceedings will also be uploaded to the image sharing site Flickr.com.

If that was not enough, the Labour Party has also opened its own Twitter account. The party will post status updates regularly, which will also be accessible on mobile phones.