Will social media have a real impact on the 2010 UK election?
January 15th, 2010 by Lloyd Gofton
For my first post in 2010, I thought I would look at a major event that is looming on the horizon, in which social media could play a major part, or simply be a missed opportunity.
This year’s UK election will soon be the main talking point for our collective media, whether offline or online, but this year, the political parties themselves could make a real impact online, and therefore on the outcome. Why do I only feel it ‘could’ have an impact? Simply because it depends on how much effort the political parties put into their online campaigns, whether they are able to reach and converse with their communities, and who, if anyone, they will ask to help them in this endeavour.
To look at the importance of digital communications in elections, the UK political parties need only look at the success of President Obama’s election campaign, much of the success for which has been put down to Obama’s ‘online organiser’ Chris Hughes, see the Digital Communities Blog for more information.
In short, according to the Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe: “Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organise. Chris Hughes saw what was possible before anyone else.”
How did he do this? Basically, Hughes built a virtual mechanism for scaling and supporting community action. He also captured and interpreted human behaviour data, in other words he listened, and utilised a range of social tools to reach his audience. This allowed Obama supporters to become online activists long before Obama’s staff were able to interact with potential voters face-to-face.
His main tool was My.BarackObama.com a fun, easily accessible networking site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another, simple but effective. It was also dramatically ahead of Obama’s competitors: Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 3.2 million Facebook profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, generated 14.5 million viewing hours on YouTube and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages. In total the campaign raised more than $500 million through average donations of under $100, in addition to mobilising new voters.
Pretty impressive, and certainly something that you would hope the UK parties have paid attention to. So where are they today, and how will they emulate this lesson from the U.S. elections?
Looking at their current offerings, the political parties start to 2010 is not overly impressive. Using data from natural search conversion agency Tamar’s political search index (Tamar is a client of Liberate Media) we can see both the Conservatives and Labour are failing to protect their search results. This is hugely important as search offers the gateway that voters will use to find essential information to base their vote on, and if they can’t even find the information that the parties are putting out, what’s the point?
Searching for the terms ‘Labour’ and ‘Conservative’ returned relevant official websites, as you would expect, but a search for either David Cameron or Gordon Brown, which some might argue are equally or more important in an election, returns unofficial blogs for both, with negative information. Gordon Brown alone is attracting around 400,000 searches a month on Google with around 30,000 of those resulting in people visiting the unofficial sites.
How should they rectify this? Well, following the Obama model, simply listen to your audience and offer them relevant content that will be useful and engaging. The more useful and relevant it is, the higher it will rank. Furthermore, social media tools such as Twitter are easy to set up and highly ranked, and again according to the data, although Gordon Brown has a Twitter account under the Downing Street name, which has 1.7 million followers, but there are no other official Twitter accounts in the name of either Brown or Cameron, though there of course plenty of unofficial alternatives.
Conservative leader Cameron’s official tweets come via the @Conservatives Twitter account, which has just 17,727 followers, but this is more than the official Labour Party account @UKLabour with 8594 followers.
So what else is out there? The conservative party has launched MyConservatives.com, which is very similar to Obama’s site, and Labour has Labourlist.org that promises to be the place where “Labour-minded people can come together”. While not formally linked to the Labour party, the site’s bloggers include Peter Mandelson and Douglas Alexander - and it has been set up by one the Government’s original spin doctors, Derek Draper.
To really understand what level of importance the parties will place on social media for the election it makes sense to see what they have to say on the subject. If we look at quotes from two of the Labour parties’ key players online we can see:
Jessica Asato who is acting director of pro-Labour party organisation Progress, said: “Obviously the web is going to play a bigger part in election 2010 than it did in 2005 but the internet won’t determine the outcome. Most voters still get the message from the general media.
“Voter apathy is again the biggest hurdle and with last year’s MPs’ expenses crisis it could be an even bigger problem this time around.”
“Obama’s campaign team were highly-calculated on Twitter and with MyBarackObama. It was less about messaging and more about engaging and I think UK politicians have some way to go before matching that.
“The Tories have invested more (online) at the moment. The Labour page for members is good, but it needs to open up to a wider audience.”
Kerry McCarthy Labour’s new media campaign spokesperson said: “I think new media could potentially play a very important role in the election, in a number of ways.
“Firstly, it will drive the news agenda and accelerate the pace at which announcements are disseminated, dissected, challenged and in some cases comprehensively rubbished, in hours or even minutes rather than in days.
“The parties will find it very hard to control this agenda in the way they’ve been accustomed to doing in past elections.
“We’ve already seen email making a real difference to the ease with which people can contact MPs, but for those MPs with an online presence their voters will also be able to search through their websites, read their blogs, contact them on Facebook and Twitter.
“Anything which makes politicians more approachable and, by extension, more accountable, is a good thing. Politicians who aren’t willing to engage in this way will lose out.
“New media is not without dangers… there is a tendency on Twitter for activists to talk/argue amongst themselves, which can put off other people who are politically interested but not involved.
“Too many MPs using Twitter are still in ‘broadcast’ mode, whereas they should treat is as a two-way conversation.”
These two view points from within the Labour party seem to show that the knowledge is there, but whether it is going to be used across the board remains to be seen. My feeling at this time is that online communications will be hugely important for the upcoming election, and although the parties are taking it more seriously, they simply don’t have the organisational understanding or willingness to get stuck in. A situation that they may live to regret if one party can surpass the doubters and make a real impact online.
Tags: Barack Obama, conservative, David Cameron, Gordon brown, labour, UK election 2010
