Personalization Online

Abstract

Research on the increasing importance of party leaders in elections has observed that party leaders maintain personal websites, blogs, and social networking sites in order to personalize the image of themselves by mixing personal and professional matters. This chapter examines whether these efforts affect the party leader character impressions by voters in a positive way. The chapter presents two experiments that examine the impact of exposure to authentic personal websites and, as a form of social media, blogs of party leaders on voters' perceptions regarding various traits of party leaders during a Finnish election campaign. The findings are mixed. The perception of one leader was significantly enhanced by exposure to his website as well as his blog. Moreover, exposure to the blog by this politician resulted in an enhanced assessment of his personality traits whereas exposure to his website had positive effect on the evaluation of his professional traits. In making sense of the findings, web and social media approaches, and participant expectancies are discussed.