Life on the hustings may be tweet, but it's still better to grip and grin John Alexander hands out campaign leaflets at Eastwood. In week one of the federal campaign, there was a moment that illustrated why old media still matters - and why social media has simultaneously transformed the field on which the second oldest profession is played. The on-camera stumbles by One Nation candidate Stephanie Banister and Liberal candidate Jaymes Diaz may not have happened on Twitter or Facebook, but it was the febrile atmosphere of the online world that turned these old-fashioned TV bloopers into viral sensations that went around the world. Indeed, anyone living abroad and taking only a casual interest in political matters in Australia is unlikely to have heard about anything else from the campaign beyond the YouTube-friendly interviews by Banister (who declared Islam to be a country) and Diaz (whose unfamiliarity with his party's policies amounted to a slow but certain televised train wreck). But in the modern campaign, such disasters throw up a paradox. Gone viral: One Nation candidate Stephanie Banister. Photo: Channel 7 While the instantaneous viral spread allowed by social media can upend a campaign in a flash and turn a candidate into a global laughing stock, on the ground, where it matters, candidates are still consumed by the realities of political life - one being that, as much as social media has changed the world, it is traditional meet-and-greet, grip-and-grin campaigning that remains the bread and butter of their experience. "I'd say there are votes to be won on social media but there are more votes to be won in real life," says ALP hopeful Tim Watts, running in the safe Victorian Labor seat vacated by the high-profile Nicola Roxon. I've always viewed social media as an extension of what I'm doing in real life and that's what it is on the campaign trail. Watts admits the danger of a campaign blooper going viral is always in the back of a candidate's mind. The spectre of Jaymes Diaz hangs over us all ... social media has added a significant degree of intensity to campaigning. It's constant at the moment. The feedback loops are quite vicious, and let's be frank - ridicule is death in politics and there's plenty of scope to look like a goose. Jaymes Diaz. But on a cold and wet Friday morning, as he and a group of volunteers hand out leaflets in the pre-dawn darkness at Footscray railway station, such disasters are not on his mind. The focus is old-fashioned retail politics - making eye contact, shaking a hand. Unfortunately, in the real world of campaigning you've got to get wet every now and then. This is the kind of weather that lets you find out who your true believers are," Watts says. Candidates say that while social media is an essential part of their modern arsenal, it is just one tool - one that helps them establish a presence, start a conversation and build the real-world relationships that are key in the battle for hearts and minds. As Watts says, social media is at its most potent as an organisational tool. It's interesting the number of times we've been on a train station and someone has tweeted us or sent us a message on Facebook later in the day saying, 'Hey, I saw you this morning, I didn't have a chance to stop but what do you think about this?' It's really an extension of real-world activities. We've had a number of volunteers contact us through our social media channels and say they want to get involved. It's adding another dimension to the campaign. John Alexander, the Liberal incumbent in the northern Sydney seat of Bennelong, says social media allows easier and more communication, but he's not convinced it's of the highest quality. My view is that there is more communication through Twittering, through Facebooking, texting, emailing - but at the same time less communication. As he spends a cold Friday morning leading a team of volunteers through a timeless campaign ritual - a doorknocking expedition - Alexander describes the benefits accruing via the "dynamic of meeting someone face to face and subliminally taking in every nuance, every physical gesture ... the rising of the voice, the way people talk with their hands ... and once you [know] someone, to then receive a text message or tweet, you have the context. But if you've only ever gotten virtual communication ... you can have 1000 people following you online, but there's less communication actually happening. I think once people actually know you, these things can have some value, but taken cold it probably doesn't match that one-on-one engagement. Nick Reece, a public policy fellow at Melbourne University and an adviser to Julia Gillard during her prime ministership and to two Victorian Labor premiers, says there is something to Alexander's celebration of the personal touch. Reece says the rise of new media and the fragmentation of information sources have in fact enhanced that element of campaigning - by driving a desire for what he calls "peer-to-peer" connection, and at the same time making such connections easier. "Studies have shown that people receive their information about politics from a multiplicity of channels," Reece says. The media markets have become increasingly fractured and within a society where there is information overload, with people getting information from so many different sources, in that environment peer-to-peer communication has become very important. So the old traditional campaigning methods - doorknocking, setting up stalls at your local railway station or shopping centre - have become increasingly important. In that information-overload environment, people increasingly value that one-to-one personal communication and they are more trusting of information that they get from someone who is a peer. It is a phenomenon most successfully harnessed by Barack Obama's two successful campaigns for the White House, and which Reece says Labor is most notably trying to copy here. Several Obama advisers are in Australia working with the Rudd campaign. "It takes a very old notion of politics and reinvents it in a modern digital sense and in a way that makes it more relevant and more important than ever before," Reece says. Australians are known as early and enthusiastic adopters of social media, with about 11.5 million of us holding Facebook accounts and 2.1 million having Twitter accounts. Roughly a million are active on Instagram. Among our most keen online citizens is Kevin Rudd, who has 1.3 million Twitter followers, and tens of thousands more on Facebook and Instagram, the outlet he chose for the year's most celebrated "selfie" - the prime ministerial shaving cut he posted in July. Tony Abbott has about 150,000 Twitter followers and 71,000 subscribers to his Facebook page. Reece describes Rudd's social media ascendancy as potentially crucial, particularly in reaching young voters. Rudd was a very early adopter of Twitter, so he's a Twitter native and I do think he uses it very well. That shaving selfie was seen by a lot of people. It generates a personal level of engagement with him as Prime Minister which is priceless in political terms and is undoubtedly a political positive for him. Further down the political food chain, no politician would be without a social media presence. But is it a vote-changer? Maxine McKew has a unique perspective on what makes a successful campaign: she observed many up close both as a journalist and as the partner of long-time Labor strategist Bob Hogg. In 2007 - when Facebook was in its infancy and Twitter didn't exist - she scored a famous campaign victory over sitting prime minister John Howard in Bennelong. In 2010 - Australia's first real social media election - she lost the seat to Alexander. Of striking the right campaign balance in the digital age, she says: "They are complementary. You certainly couldn't do one without the other so it's a mix of the old and new. I can't imagine there would be any candidate out there who would not be actively involved with social media ... So I think it's a great way of communicating. I don't think it's a great way of securing votes or perhaps even switching votes. For that there is nothing to replace the person-to-person contact. You need to be doing the community barbecues, you need to be in the shopping centres. For a candidate like Leslie Cannold - on the Senate ticket for Wikileaks in Victoria - the campaign has been about harnessing her already potent social media presence to the new reality of the political world. I am primarily utilising my social media channels to have engagement with people and to put out things that interest me. [But] I don't in any way discount the importance of being in front of an audience ... and the way in which that kind of engagement can move and inspire people I don't think is possible electronically ... a huge part of what moves people's behaviour is not what happens in the head, it's what happens in the heart. And you can much more easily move people's hearts when you are in front of them. Back in Bennelong, another youthful digital native, Jason Yat-sen Li, agrees with that assessment. Only recently chosen to run for Labor against Alexander, Yat-sen Li has had to scramble to build a campaign presence. He has a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a Twitter account, complete with a personal hashtag, #ImWithJason. Yet for all that, he maintains that if he is to repeat McKew's achievement and win Bennelong for Labor, it will be on the streets, in the shopping centres and at the school fetes that voters will be most persuaded. We've got an active social media campaign and that's really important to us. It's just another effective way to get our messages across and reach people, but it can't replace the traditional doorknocking.