Parties tweeting their way to Downing Street

April 15, 2010 in Features

For the first time in the UK, social media is expected to play a key role in the outcome of the General Election. Just as the power to enrich campaigns and engage with voters is only a tweet away, the possibility of humiliation is not far away either.

Even those who were still wondering about the importance of the role social media will play in the election may have had their minds changed by the fierce online response to the Digital Economy Bill.

The controversial Bill, that has been accused of being a rushed-through-piece-of-bad-legislation, resulted in, what BBC’s technology blogger Rory-Cellan Jones calls an “online storm” with furious tweets and comments condemning both the Bill and the process by which it was enacted.

According to Jones, this resulted in a clearly more thorough second reading and the whole incident demonstrates a real sense of people connecting with the Parliamentary process for the first time.

Campaigning with hashtags

Brian Kelly, a national Web coordinator and advisor from UKOLN, says that dismissing Twitter as a waste of time or full of irrelevances is evidently a mistake.

As the example set by the Digital Economy Bill shows, the focus of the conversation is shifting online, making Twitter an important part of political process.

According to Kelly this will be the first election to be fought around hashtags.

He said: “The use of Twitter is starting to become an important part of the political debate, with tweets becoming the twenty-first century’s equivalent to the heckles at election meetings.”

To the Twitter critics, Kelly points out that the fact that part of the conversation will inevitably be rude or irrelevant shouldn’t be used to dismiss the whole medium.

He said: “There will also be a lot of trivia being discussed on telephones, but nobody refuses to use the telephone because of this.”

Worth the risk?

While harnessing social media in the election campaigns is appealing, the danger of things going horribly wrong is something that political parties will have to consider.

A MediaWeek article quoted an unnamed senior executive at an election agency complaining about the unforeseen nature of the web.

He said: “It just takes one renegade MP to say something off-message and you’ve got political journalists ruining a campaign strategy it’s taken you weeks to create.

“Show me a story generated by the web that isn’t negative – and they’re being created 24/7 rather than just on the News at Ten.”

But there’s also another side to the coin. The Labour party have utilised their tech savvy supporters by fostering an online community to test ideas on.

Labour’s social media guru Kerry McCarthy said in a MediaWeek article: “If we’d shown them something like the Conservative’s Cash Gordon site, they would have pulled it apart in hours – showing us that it wasn’t very good and that it could easily be used by the opposition.

But all of this comes with a health warning. To avoid disasters Brian Kelly would urge parties not get overexcited about the possibilities and jump in head first.

He said: “What party activists are doing is trying to start a conversation. Social media offers a better informal channel for discussion but it’s important to remember that you should also listen carefully, otherwise there’s a great possibility to be seen as a fool.”