Singapore, a country with an electorate of no bigger than 3 million, is heading towards polling day on 7 May 2011. While the last general election in 2006 saw little use of social media (with the exception of blogs), the general election this year is heavily influenced by social media, in particular Facebook. Voters and candidates alike are using Facebook for political campaigning in unimaginable ways, including using business cards with Facebook skin and creating fake profiles to give the impression of a more balanced distribution of support for the two sides.

One notable phenomenon on Facebook is the rise of Nicole Seah, a 24-year-old candidate from a non-leading opposition party with little work experience whatsoever, who has won more than 42,000 fans in a span of less than two weeks. These numbers may not sound impressive, but consider that Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all baked into one super-strongman, has a Facebook page that garners about 55,000 fans over several years. Nicole is currently the second most-Liked politician in Singapore:

Facebook may be the very reason that this year’s general election may turn out to be very different – it already is very different in terms of its build-up. More voters are using Facebook to write political Notes that are shared publicly, and real-time data and communication allow for a scalable way of spreading information through Pages and status updates. Information spreads like wildfire, and, in a city-state with high IT-literacy, the state-backed mainstream media might find itself increasingly irrelevant.

Ultimately, Facebook seriously increases political awareness and engagement among voters. It inspires emboldenment, by allowing like-minded people to gain idea validation, it brings to light issues of concern (e.g. alternative policies, voting secrecy, political scandals), and it fuels activism, something that the generally-passive Singaporean population is often accused of being incapable of. In a way, Facebook is also a leveler of the political battlefield, given that the incumbent government would find it very hard to regulate the flow of information on a third-party platform hosted in the US.

Will some votes swing because of Facebook? No doubt. The question is, as with online marketing, to what extent online metrics, such as shares, Likes, number of comments, etc., are correlated with results (be it the number votes or online purchases).