The advent of the 21st Century brought along some significant challenges in the arena of political communication, among those, the development of web-based applications that enabled the transition between web 1.0 and 2.0, around 2004 . Such transition opened a huge window of opportunity for political parties willing to enhance their communication in many ways: broadening their audience, reaching diverse population segments and diversifying their message, something that by the dawn of 2012 hasn’t been consolidated yet.

Since its creation as a publicly available tool in 1994, the web has been always changing and evolving and nothing indicates that this tendency is likely to stop in the near future. For instance, in 2008 Barack Obama’s presidential campaign showed the use of state-of-the-art social networking and became a key component on his victory against John McCain, something that wasn’t replicated at the same level in his 2012 incumbent campaign since the novelty of his previous campaign has already faded. As the concept suggests, novelty applications and techniques might give a heads-on advantage to a political party willing to implement them, but such innovations must be continuous if such advantage wants to be maintained.

This chapter aims towards providing an introductory assessment on the situation of web-based communication among Latin American parties. The chapter draws information on a research carried down by the author which analyses the web-presence of all the major political parties in Mexico, Chile and Colombia which give light on some shared regional trends among parties.

This chapter is divided in four broad sections which aim towards providing an overview on the web based political communication among Latin American parties. The first section briefly details the nature of web-based communication, why it is important and why is web 2.0 particularly relevant under that context. On the second part, the chapter addresses some common misinterpretations and mistakes about what often “politicians think” is web-based communication. The third section will describe briefly some of the author’s findings within Mexico, Chile and Colombia, emphasizing some relevant regional trends. In the final section a conclusion is drawn around the idea of the reality of Latin American parties regarding web-based communication and the necessity of reinventing themselves under the perspective of what is yet to come.

Contents

1. Why Communicating via the Web?
1. The Professionalization of Political Campaigning, and the Necessity of Permanent Campaigning
2. The Demographic Curve
3. Closing the Digital Gap and SNS levels of Penetration

2. Common Mistakes while Communicating Online
1. Trying to Control the Messages Over the Web
2. Amateurism
3. Defective Communication
4. Face valuing Social Networking Sites

3. Overview of the Web 2.0 Scenario in Latin America
1. Degree of Adoption of Web 2.0 Tools
2. Most and Least Frequently Used Tools
3. The Degree of Horizontality of the Web-Based Party communication

4. Conclusions: The Future of Political Parties
5. Appendix
6. References