Was this really the social media election?
Wales Business — By Alison Goldsworthy on May 3, 2010 7:00 am
It may have had some impact, but this has not been the social media election people were predicting
“IF POLITICS is showbusiness for ugly people, then online politics is a dating site for the socially inadequate.” This was how Daran Hill branded anyone reading this online political site prior to the General Election.
Predictions about the role of social media in this campaign varied from Daran’s own reasonably moderate assessment to suggestions this would be the Twitter election, with camera phone mightier than the sword. The election was marked by a more common form of campaigning. Define your message, identify your target market, and then communicate with them.
The internet has grown so wide that having a website has long been essential for any candidate with even the vaguest ambitions. The fact that one of Wales’ political parties didn’t have its own site until the start of the campaign (unreported by the mainstream press), shows the big gaps can go largely unnoticed. At least, as long as it doesn’t matter to your target voters.
That glitch aside, though, we’ve seen all parties move to where their target voters are. Facebook has joined the web as a whole as an essential place to have a presence, although people seem split between the use of profiles, fan pages and groups. They aren’t alone in that – it’s not like charities have got their heads around it, either.
Many of us reading this will also be users of Twitter. It’s hard to get stats for the UK, but the most recent analysis suggests that users are generally likely to be based in London, under 35 and of a left-liberal leaning. Exactly the group that is distrustful of Labour and moving away. The Tories and Lib Dems have both made a play for their vote and it is the latter that seem to have won out. Helped by an alienation from the Tories that already existed and an attempted monstering from the right wing press, Twitter responded by rallying to Nick Clegg. What monitoring tools there are don’t always get irony, meaning the #nickcleggsfault hashtag tended to show up as a negative mention.
Twitter’s influence in Wales is harder still to measure. Mediawales fed some tweets directly into its coveritlive coverage of the leaders debates. There were also cases of candidates responding to inaccuracies in newspapers via Twitter – in effect using it as a way to brief supporters and stunt potential opposition attempts to attack them. Although blatant attempts to rig polls are normally found out.
Like political parties, charities and lobbying organisations have certainly identified their target markets. The likes of Advocacy Online have acted as a facility to co-ordinate online lobbying leaving candidates with thousands of emails to respond too. Many campaigning organisations have asked their supporters to ask local candidates to back a pledge. Working with the likes of 38 degrees, this may be the beginning of an army of online progressive activists. With belts being tightened on public spending, politicians should get ready to react to this. It may yet be the biggest internet outcome from the election.
It is from this organising of activists perspective that the internet may have revolutionised things. Parties have been smart at setting up groups of supportive target voters and reminding them to join the electoral register. If you aren’t in one of those groups, a bit like if you aren’t in a marginal seat, much of this activity will have passed people by. Additionally it will be the closed groups, only open to core campaigners that marshal them around the country to key seats that will have been useful. The Conservatives iphone app (Data protection issues aside) gave activists the opportunity to live update information as they canvassed. This built on the tele-canvassing operations and co-ordinations already used by other parties.
In 2007, political blogs flourished in Wales. By marked contrast 2010 has failed to see political blogs, especially Welsh ones, gain the same traction. Maybe if there is a hung Parliament, as 2007 saw in the Assembly, they will once again come into their own. It’s not a new idea that blogs can fill a vacuum left by mainstream news, but the evidence would seem to suggest that is right. As the broadcast and print media have broken stories, blogs have been found wanting. Maybe all the activists who run them decided that their time was better spent on the doorstep – who those target audiences are more likely to be found.
No amount of social media activity will replace the basics of a good campaign: a good message, good targeting and good communication.
Tags: 2010 General Election, blogging, facebook, social media, social networking, Twitter
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12 Comments
Enjoyed the article.
I keep finding the ‘whoever said this would be an internet election was wrong…’ aside as repetitive as the debate itself. Did anyone of note say this would be the internet election? I just find it odd everyone is writing a post mortem article on something that was never a serious contention anyway.
What would an internet election look, sound and feel like? I have yet to see someone describe it in detail and without television still being king.
And honestly, I don’t think we will ever have an internet election. Unless perhaps we start having e-Voting (which I support). The PM debates have built on the foundations of TV being the biggest factor in elections.
I tweet, facebook, blog. Besides my blog, which I post to my facebook so the people in my council ward can see, all that social media is in a permanent loop of talking to the same people. With Peter Black and one of my best mates (a Plymouth Labour activist) replying to me the most, I don’t think it is winning votes.
“In 2007, political blogs flourished in Wales. By marked contrast 2010 has failed to see political blogs, especially Welsh ones, gain the same traction”
In 2007 they were new and exciting. By now pretty much every politician, researcher and other politico has at least had a go at writing one.
This article is interesting and thought provoking. But I think political parties need to change the modus operandi of their web presence. It has to recognise that it is not a naked vote winner, leave that to offline campaigning. Parties need to make sure their web presence is attractive to opinion formers and the mainstream media. It needs to provide the tools for activists to go out and campaign, and be easy to navigate if a ‘normal’ person wants to access the party’s online presence.
I will write something longer and more coherent on my blog.
Good article, Ali.
I think we need to distinguish between predictions of a “social media” election (predictions of which were most certainly made) and an “internet election”. I don’t know whether we had the former, but we are certainly having the latter.
Think of it like shopping. We are deep into the internet shopping age, but this doesn’t mean that all or most shopping is done online. It means that some is, but that much of the remainder is influenced by the pervasiveness of the internet. This might be from online price checkers for consumers (which in turn changes the pricing strategies of offline retailers) to online logistics facilities for wholesalers.
“The internet” can’t make people vote any more than it can make them shop. But what it is doing is providing tools to improve the traditional and time worn means of a) organising activists b) communicating messages. Even if voters/activists often aren’t using these tools themselves their activities are being shaped by them. A gaffe that goes viral is able to be replayed online by a print journalist who then writes it up in a newspaper that is read by voters. Does that make it an internet phenomenon or not? The distinction is becoming irrelevant.
TV is pretty much the same. I missed the Cameron/Marr interview yesterday morning, but watched it at lunchtime on iPlayer via my PS3 plugged into my TV. What technology then allowed me to see this interview? Both, of course. By the 2015 election, non-linear viewing will be even more prevalent. I suspect people then will find the idea of a debate about a TV vs an internet election rather quaint.
Adam,
Agree with you on the distinction between what is online and offline being lost. However, the power of anything online is only achieved via offline channels of communication. If ‘bigotted woman’ was written in an email rather than said on a mic, it would not have been worth a dime until the television covered it, and would have been less of a story.
The Shopping comparison is interesting. An interesting development in anything changed by the media is whether it changes the game itself. Do we shop differently online to offline? Does a webpage make us change our model of how we choose to purchase something? Radio and then Television changed politics forever, perhaps the 24 hour media is already doing so as we speak, but is the internet likely to?
Infrastructure is one thing, but much like how we are evolving how we read and write because of the use of the internet, it will be interesting to see how the art of politics itself changes.
Hmmm. Not at all sure that viral material is limited to audiovisual content only, or that non-audiovisual material won’t be covered by TV, or indeed that only TV matters here. Think McBride emails. This was a scandal born in the blogosphere and given heft by the print media. Online and offline largely indistinguishable.
If GB had left a note in a restaurant describing his encounter in Rochdale as he did on mic (leaving aside the question of how committing such thought to writing would have changed them) it would have gained as much traction.
I think the extent to which this has been an internet election is this: people (meatspace people, not cyberdwellers like me) watched the leaders’ debates and then googled afterwards to find out more about what the three leaders had said. This is what I am getting told on the doorstep, anyway. People say “I never considered the Lib Dems before, but I liked your man when he was on the telly, so I looked up your manifesto online” and things like that.
Very good article.
What is ‘social media’? Does it encompass websites and blogs? Or is it confined to facebook and and twitter? Is TV a ‘social media? I think some distinctions should be made or are they all blurring together as political communication tools?
As to the effect of the Internet on the election this is impossible to assess at the moment – we haven’t had the result yet! There is something powerful going on though as evidenced by the Twitter trending #bigotgate which I am pleased to report I think I was one of the very first to ‘coin’ this hashtag.
Thanks everyone.
Marcus I think a lot of people wanted this to be the social media election. It’s a handy tag, even if the likelihood of it happening was always a lot slimmer than made out. Not least because it would turn years of comms experience on it’s head. It’s the fallout of people seeing that obama used the net. Of course in the states it’s used a lot for fundraising and sites like youfundme haven’t gained the same traction. Speak to people involve din the Obama campaign, and they’ll tell you it was the message and the cause people coalesced around not the internet. Sites Like MyBO were innovative in the way they facilitated that.. I’m not sure I think blogs were all that new in 07. I simply think that they added to the debate. This time there is so much UK media coverage and discussion I don;t think they’ve had the same place to breathe..
Adam- I like the shopping analogy though I’d compare it to when people buy tech much more. People were get their eye caught by something in the shops, or compare things up close then go home and find the deal that best suits them online. That ties into Jennie’s experience.
Cambria: All media is social. Discuss
Ali, don’t underestimate the Google search engine. Been out doing some canvassing and it is surprising the amount of ordinary folks who do not write blogs may actually read blogs, especially in what is a very close election.
Twitter is certainly not taken seriously with average people, maybe desk bound people. Pretty useless in finding out information on politicians. People do tap in politicians’ names to see what they can find. A lady made a point of telling me this morning that a certain politician’s expenses she had found on the internet was not conducive to her.
Many people are just tuned to politicians ways of answering questions, they really wanna find out what others think of those politicians.
“Hmmm. Not at all sure that viral material is limited to audiovisual content only, or that non-audiovisual material won’t be covered by TV, or indeed that only TV matters here. Think McBride emails. This was a scandal born in the blogosphere and given heft by the print media. Online and offline largely indistinguishable.”
I don’t think I said that to be fair. I said that audiovisual has more of an impact, particularly when it makes that jump from offline to online.
‘The blogsphere’ today is merely the gossip lot around politics of today. Lots of Welsh Bloggers share stuff the MSM as par of the course and vice versa. In fact in Wales most of the bloggers are either media or working in politics, much like offline/online distinction, the bloggers/media distinction is as hard to define.
I’m Reading This on my iPhone, and pausing to check my tweets. Now I know this makes me part of a rather finite group and we aren’t going to be the ones to decide the election, but when you look at the trending topics and four of the top five are connected to the election you can see the impact it has (Star Wars day being the fifth).
#bigotgate has already been used as an example of the role of social media. This misses the point really. Bigotgate was a traditional media story passed secondhand around Twitter. It felt very much like a managed affair, by the Labour party as much as anyone else.
A more interesting example is #philippastroud. A story that really should be out there, but TV and print media aren’t covering it in any real way. Twitter is being used by members of the LGBT community not nesesarily associated with any party to share this story and inform as wide a group as possible.
If this isn’t the internet election maybe it’s the people’s election, as one thing the Internet does is allows anyone to check and share information. We no longer trust either the politicians or the traditional media to give us real news, in fact we expect them to tell us a distorted version of the truth.
One area of real change at this election is making politics more accessible to excluded groups. @Scope has a great #pollsapart campaign. #peoplefirst groups have been running hustings events, @MENCAP have campaigned well on #r_word against using negative language. @autismwales successfully lobbied all parties to produce easy read manifestos and published them on line as well as producing easy read versions of the leaders debates.
The internet, Twitter, blogs and facebook are all tools but tools available to everyone, not just Murdoch, Mandelson and Coulson.
Interesting that the debate in the comments on this article have focused largely on what we can count as social media. If you’re looking for a social media election – all you need to do is look at the Obama campaign where thousands of young people rallied on Facebook, Twitter and online networks to pledge their support and donations for the candidate and he was constantly interacting back (famously glued to his Blackberry).
This morning scouting through the most recent polls I found this from Ipsos Mori – If you click on ‘download topline results’ at the bottom of this page: http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2606
And look at question 16 you’ll see evidence that the ‘old-school’ methods are still the most interaction people see from their candidates – with leaflets (95%), billboards (74%), and letters (62%) the top ways people have been interacting with the election. Social networks like Facebook (17%), websites (18%) and emails (10%) have a pretty low ‘yes’ percentage for electioneering. (It’s also quite telling that many people also haven’t met their candidate in person – as this is surely door to door is the most traditional form of campaigning.)
Just some interesting stats to add to the debate.
There’s an interesting article on Silicon.com about this issue if anyone is interested entitled Tweeting-brown-and-web-cameron-how-to-win-votes-obama-style