Last night our friends from Politnetz.ch hosted the second installment of the Politforelle, or political trout, a somewhat regular meetup of those interest in Swiss politics and the Web.
Andreas of Politnetz, who had organized the event (thank you for that!), managed to find two very interesting guys to present: Moritz Zumbühl, CEO of the Feinheit agency and candidate for the Green Party in Zurich as well as Stefan Krattiger, a successful, young politician (how do you translate Gemeinderatspräsident?) of the Social Democratic Party from the Bernese Oberland both talked about their experience with the Net.
While Moritz Zumbühl was quite skeptical about the power of Social Media in general (except Facebook, as he stressed), he stated that he heavily relies on E-Mail (again). The only problem being the obtaining of E-Mail adresses. But he was able to show some interesting cases in which mailing helped to get a campaign off the ground. At the same time he is convinced that in Switzerland there is not yet a way to successfully bypass mass media when you want to get your word out big time.
Stefan Krattiger talked about his campaign to become Gemeinderatspräsident (president of his local town council). Amongst other things he started chatting up young people from his town via Facebook and managed to mobilize them. They would not have voted otherwise and eventually carried him to victory.
Both, however, were not convinced that online Social Media will be successfully used by Swiss parties in the near future. Too fragmented and decentralized is the national party landscape.
