Posts tagged politics
Gordon Brown is out and Cameron is in: How Britain’s first digital election panned out
May 12th
Last week, Gordon Brown said that the “novelty” of televised leaders’ debates had “clouded” the General Election campaign, an excuse will do, but it was social media that made the really impact Gordon.
This has been Britain’s first social media election, as Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg all took lessons for the digital President Barack Obama.
And the digital strategy worked to in getting more Brits to vote: 29.6 million Brits took to the polls last week, as opposed to the 27.1 million that turned up in 2005.
This time around, the election wasn’t a popularity contest. It wasn’t about kissing babies and shaking hands with the public – it was about reform and the age of digital putting the focus on what the UK public really wanted – a change of government it seems.
Social media also catapulted UK politics onto the world stage in a way that made it seem less hard to understand and fathom – it censored all the complicated bits and somehow led people to believe they were in fact voting for the fate of a nation…not just the most popular candidate. Read the rest of this entry »
MARKETING STUNT OF THE WEEK: Pizza Express’ political debate
Apr 29th
The general election in the UK has gone from being about freaky billboard ads, from being about Twitter debates to Facebook polls. Now it’s turned up on pizza in this week’s Marketing Stunt of the Week.
Prudence Staite, a food artist, has cooked up a series of political pizzas based on the three party leaders.
Chefs at Pizza Express have also created a People’s Pizza to reflect the big issues of the campaign.
The Gordon Brown pizza includes fiery chilli and ground beef, while David Cameron is represented with cheese and rocket.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg gets fresh tomato and spicy sausage on his pizza.
The toppings include caviar, representing the debate about class and equal opportunities, and dough balls for the national deficit.
Voters flock to Facebook after another live TV Leader’s Debate
Apr 23rd
What do you do when there’s an election around the corner? Turn to Facebook, of course.
In 2008, President Barack Obama won the race to presidency thanks to his savvy internet skills and ability to promote himself on sites such as YouTube and Facebook. It wasn’t long before he was hailed as a ‘man of the digital age’, and now the Brits are following suit in order to win over the hearts and minds of British voters.
Taking part in another live TV debate, Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron took to the stage last night as the British voters took to Facebook to vote on policy and sentiment.
Over 2000 people also logged on to Facebook’s Rate the Debate application to mark the leaders’ performances during the debate.
And it was Nick Clegg’s performance seemed to hit all the right buttons last night, according to a poll of more than 20,000 Facebook users. Read the rest of this entry »
The Leaders’ Debate as seen on Twitter
Apr 20th
Andrew Boyers, from onlinefire explains the power of Twitter when it comes to live debates.
Unless you were under a cloud of volcanic ash (oh, wait…), you’ll have known that last night saw the UK’s first ever leaders’ debate on ITV. The event, despite an Icelandic volcano’s best efforts, has dominated the news agenda across all media platforms for the last week.
Online opinion tracker Tweetminster provided consistently interesting facts throughout proceedings and in the aftermath with regards to interest in the debate on Twitter. Throughout the debate, a staggering 35,483 people tweeted 184,396 times, with an average frequency of 29.06 tweets per second.
To put that into some form of context, that’s fifteen times more tweets than were seen for #askthechancellors and almost triple the volume of tweets posted during BNP leader Nick Griffin’s infamous appearance on Question Time – both of which saw significant surges in interest themselves.
Admittedly, in the context of the entire UK population those figures seem less impressive. However, they still do add to the belief that – in social media circles – the appetite for political consumption is there. Read the rest of this entry »
The Blues Have It: Tory v Labour approaches to online marketing
Apr 12th
Bruce Townsend, ecommerce software supplier, Actinic
With the election upon us, and bearing in mind the reputed influence of the internet in the US presidential campaign, I thought it would be interesting to see how the two key rivals for Number 10 are performing so far in their online marketing.
Starting with Google – as you do – I noticed that David Cameron already has his own domain name, www.davidcameronmp.com. On the other hand, www.gordonbrown.co.uk is available, but not claimed by the eponymous PM; while www.gordonbrown.com is a political protest site and www.gordon-brown.co.uk is an estate agency in Chester le Street. Strike one for Cameron.
Brown’s page is within the Labour Party site, www.labour.org.uk/gordon-brown. But it languishes near the bottom of page one in searches for ‘Gordon Brown’, and has to be propped up with a pay-per-click ad. Whereas Cameron’s site manages to rank first for his own name. Another blow for the opposition.
For the volume of searches, Google has provided a page showing the relative performance of the three party leaders, www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/elections2010. The incumbent currently polls more than both his main rivals put together. One back for the man in the red shirt.
Of their respective web pages, Cameron’s is the better looking, but mostly filled with a rather turgid biography, although it does at least have some video content. Brown on the other hand scores with a Twitter feed, albeit from Mrs Brown and not himself.
Both have links to Facebook, but Brown disappointingly links to a Labour Party page with 15,000 fans, compared with Cameron’s personal 21,000.
The killer blow for the man in blue is a Facebook app. that enables his supporters to share his latest messages with their Facebook friends. This should put the Tories well ahead of Labour in disseminating their message via the UK’s largest social networking site. Whether that will prove a killer blow in the election, time will tell.
uSocial media and politics: power to the people?
Mar 24th
Andrew Boyers, from onlinefire explains how the general election will dominate social media.
The General Election is unlikely to be dominated by social media, as it was in the 2008 American presidential election. It will, however, be the first in this country to be influenced by its presence.
One only has point to Barack Obama’s success to see the benefits of using social media as a grassroots support tool. While millions of dollars were raised and on-the-ground activists united behind Obama, I did not detect much political discourse permeating through the official channels of his social media platforms.
Arguably, the opposite is the case in the UK – little political online activity in this country is aimed at recruitment and fundraising. There are, however, a number of politicians and commentators who seek to communicate with voters and influence the political agenda through social media – @kerrymp, @torybear, and @campbellclaret, to name just three.
Indeed, both the major party leaders, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, have sought to harness social media with their own viral video efforts – Webcameron and the Number 10 YouTube channel – with debatable degrees of success.
It’s fair to say that politics and social media in the UK is still the preserve of a comparatively small group of people either inside the Westminster bubble itself, or those with a strong interest in what’s going on in the corridors of power.
However, discourse within that small group is having an impact on a wider scale – and much of that conversation is generated through social media. For example, many people will have seen the numerous parodies of the David Cameron ‘We can’t go on like this’ Tory posters generated by @mydavidcameron and documented in the wider press. Even at this early stage of electioneering, political capital has been gained and lost by the major parties’ presence on social media and other users’ reactions to the parties.
This is only likely to intensify as the number of people interacting with politics via the Internet increases. Moving forward, social media avenues such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will be vital to engaging with the electorate as a whole and in particular youth voters, a highly apathetic generation, according to a Guardian article.
So while we probably won’t see Gordon and David ditching their despatch boxes any time soon, it’s certainly worth noting that their stance and success are going to be increasingly influenced by online activity, starting with this year’s election.
Saturated by Facebook – from politics to getting fired
Mar 23rd
Our politicians are reaching out via Facebook and people are now even being fired over the medium as some 940 million around the world log on at least twice a day.
As the site becomes more popular than Google, many are using social media’s darling, Facebook, as their main information portal.
There are currently 940 million social media users in the world, according to a new study from InSites Consulting. Of that, 28,280,000 Brits (77% of the online population) use social media websites.
And now the politicians want in on the action
The 2010 UK general election arrived on Facebook today to tap into the mass market of social media. It has launched Democracy UK, a fan page established for UK users to engage with the hot political topics in the build up to the election.
It worked for President Obama so why not for our UK pollies?
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