The General Election. Has new media had an influence?
by Andrew Campbell
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube… not what first springs to mind when you think about politics. But over the last few years, more and more politicians have started using the internet as a tool to drum up political support.
When the Presidential elections in the US got under way in 2008, Democratic candidate Barack Obama used the internet to great effect to raise funds and gain supporters in his race to be President. His success has seen UK politicians follow suit and with the current general election, UK political parties have been pushing their online activities more than ever. Below are some examples of what they’ve been up to:
Email
Arguably the strongest tool for online campaigning. It’s a cost effective way for a party to improve communication with their electorates. Labour have been heavily relying on email as part of its campaign tactics to rally support through word-of-mouth. Their emails contain advice to electors on the best way they can email friends or make door-to-door visits to increase support.
Google:
Google AdWords are used to gather campaign support. It has been reported that the Conservatives have been sponsoring thousands of Google AdWords for more than three years. Their adverts appear when a person makes a Google search that contains key political terms including “Gordon Brown”. When you type his name in Google, a sponsored link to the Conservative website appears.
Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture secretary, told the Financial Times: “We use Google search advertising heavily to reach millions of people with relevant messages”.
Facebook & YouTube:
Parties have made their own groups on Facebook to allow users to show their support for their preferred party.
It also provides up to date information on the chosen party with links to news articles sourced from their website.
Facebook is also collaborating with YouTube to give the public the chance to ask questions to the three main political parties. Users can post text or video questions on both sites to Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown.
British politicians can’t buy TV advertising but they can put their video content on YouTube. Videos, speeches and online petitions can be found from many of the parties.
Twitter:
For politicians, Twitter is a great place for signposting and drawing people into a debate or it can be a device to instantly deny any allegations made at them. It also allows politicians to indirectly talk to the journalists and opinion-leaders that follow their tweets – potentially swaying an agenda in their favour.
In January of this year it was reported that Labour was leading in Tweets with 113,201 followers, more than both the Conservatives (36,874) and Liberal Democrats (32,202) combined.
There has also been interesting public use of Twitter during the elections. Throughout the first televised election debate, 211,000 tweets were sent by 47,420 twitterers. The tweets were used after the debates in poll analysis to show positive sentiment towards each party leader.
So how much impact is the web having in the election?
Figures from UTalkMarketing.com show the UK is still far behind the levels of success seen in the US election 2009 campaign. For the UK General Election an average of just 9% of adults were aware politicians had content online via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. While 50% of consumers were unaware of politicians or parties operating on Twitter, only 5% said they had viewed content managed by any political parties on YouTube.
So it’s clear that the use of web in UK politics is still in its infancy, however, there have already been some success stories. For the general public there are now more opportunities to become involved with the election process. Facebook has seen a strong response to its “Democracy UK’ page with 14,000 registration forms being downloaded from the site with about 40% of these being young people aged 18 to 25. Raising money online for conservative candidates has also made progress, with individual nominees raising as much as £10,000 each – a process never before possible. Plus, Google also has its own dedicated General Election site. It makes it much easier for voters to access information about their candidates and party policies whenever they want to see it.
No reward without risk
While there are new possibilities to how politics can have an interactive presence on the web there have been signs of danger for the politicians using it too. The freedom to put comments in the public domain via the web can also work against them as Labour candidate Stuart McLennan discovered – he was ditched after making obscene tweets. Since the scandal, candidates have been avoiding the use of Twitter in fear that they will say something they regret later. Or as David Cameron put it when asked about Twitter on a radio station: “Too many twits make a twat”.
While politicians have to be wary of the danger a slip of the keyboard can cause, they also have to be wary of what other people are saying about them too. A few Labour bloggers used the web to promote a spoof of the Conservatives recent £400,000 poster campaign. The original poster was a close-up of David Cameron’s face with the words, “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit. Not the NHS”. The Labour Party bloggers were quick to poke fun at Cameron’s image, which they believed looked airbrushed. The spoof ad, “Airbrushed For Change” was put on the web for everyone’s amusement. It picked up momentum quickly with more people handing in their own photo-shopped version of the spoof ad. It completely undermined the original campaign and became so successful that Labour has now officially used these spoof ads as part of their own promotion while the Conservatives have stopped using the poster campaign completely.
Labour had a similar problem though when they released their own poster campaign. It had Cameron 
superimposed on a shot of TV character, Gene Hunt from the TV series Ashes to Ashes. The line was “Don’t let him take us back to the 80s” a message that accuses Mr Cameron of wanting to revert back to the Thatcher era. The problem was that Gene Hunt is a popular TV character and comparing Cameron to him could be perceived as a boost for his image. The Conservatives were happy to exploit this by making their own version of the poster with the line ‘Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for change”. That was quickly followed by another spoof ad, this time referencing the TV show “Life on Mars” – a reference to the negative connotations of 70s Labour. The Conservatives successfully circulated both these posters online to discredit Labour.
And the winner is…
It doesn’t seem this election will be won over the internet but it is playing its part. Politicians now have more ways to interact with the public and their supporters. They’re also not restricted by the limited airtime given by more traditional forms of communication such as TV. The challenge for politicians though is to get more people viewing their content online, as many aren’t aware it’s there or aren’t interested enough to look.
Poster campaigns have been a big winner in this election. They’ve drawn a big reaction – but not in a conventional sense. Instead posters have been subject to ridicule on blogs over the internet. Both rival parties and the general public have created spoof versions of the originals and circulated them online. This process undermines the original communication, which benefits rival parties and becomes a source of entertainment for the viewing public. It is interesting to think how other more traditional forms of advertising may be influenced by the web in future elections. Or how other forms of media may be manipulated and circulated through the web.
I think the real winners though are the general public. The web seems to provide more opportunities to interact with politics than ever before. They have more access to information and a new means to interact and express their views. This gives them a better chance to be heard and have more say than just their vote.
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