On Saturday everyone who logs into Facebook will be asked if they have registered to vote yet. If they say No they will automatically be taken to the About My Vote site and given more instructions on getting onto the electoral register in time for 6th May.
The promotion of the About My Vote site itself has been pretty good in terms of coverage, I for one have seen it on TV and online several times, so it is good to see it has got an even more pervasive element attached to it. Using Facebook is such a no brainer when it comes to reaching as many of the millions of unregistered as possible – however will they hit the No option?
Annoying pop-ups and distractions which avert you from your task are commonplace to online users and the automatic reaction is usually – get rid of said annoyance as soon as possible. It will be interesting to see if Facebook really take on the challenge of convincing their users this issue is worthy of their attention – examples could be blanketing all side bar ads with the About My Vote site, or integrating/ connecting the message with groups/ pages around that subject already on the site.
This is still a fantastic intiative and is the first time I am aware of that Facebook have done anything like this for a cause not internal (props to the Electoral Commission) e.g informing you about their gazillionth privacy policy/layout change!
Being informed on the traffic to the About My Vote site and the consequent electoral registrations is where this starts to get really interesting though…I wonder if we’ll ever know…
