Craig Elder

Back in March, I was interviewed by Adriane Scott-Kemp of Goldsmiths, University of London about the impact the internet might have on the upcoming General Election.

I saw the finished video for the first time today, and there's a good range of views represented across the piece. Although there's agreement on one point in particular - everyone felt the TV debates would have the biggest impact on the campaign.

So, after neglecting my Wordpress blog for the best part of 2 months, I've decided that a change of platform will somehow help change my behaviour.

Wish me luck!

How can we use the principle of crowd sourcing in politics? The last couple of weeks have seen Labour and the Conservatives attempt to get their supporters involved in the campaign with strikingly different results.

Last Wednesday we launched "Your Budget Response", a project that put the collective wisdom of the British public to work on helping to unpick the small print in this year's Red Book.

As an opposition party, there's an obvious asymmetry of resources between us and the Government - who have a huge number of civil servants at their disposal. A project like this is an attempt to level the playing field by encouraging anyone with access to a computer to join our team, pore over the figures and find the "devil in the detail".

The submissions (over 1000 of them) were sent direct to our Treasury team for further analysis. And we got some great stuff which, now that the Budget debate is over, you can view in the Issuu document reader below.

This exercise proves that George Osborne's "army of armchair auditors" is definitely out there, ready and willing to go through the figures and hold the Government to account - uncovering the truth behind any manipulated stats or misleading economics.

The idea for the site was itself sourced from the crowd. The blogger Dizzy Thinks (his fantastic blog also an example of what can happen when politics and technology collide) pointed out that Gordon Brown's "10p tax con" (the unraveling of which was the defining moment of the 2008 budget) was first spotted by bloggers and that the Conservatives should take this as an indication of the level of expertise that could potentially be tapped into.

In contrast, Labour have invited their supporters to submit ideas or designs for their next poster, which will be displayed on 10 digital ad sites in London and Manchester over Easter weekend.

They're displaying the shortlist over on the Labour website just now, and while I don't really want to get into the aesthetics, it's really striking how negative and personal the majority of the adverts are. I guess time will tell whether Labour's foray into crowd sourcing pays off for them, but I can't help but wonder if they're tapping into "the wisdom of crowds" or just the hostility of the hardcore activist.

Originally posted at http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/redyellowblue/archive/2010/04/02/69712.aspx

There can be little doubt that the role of the internet in the 2010 election will be significantly different to what we saw in 2005. The 3 parties haven’t all just changed their leaders – their overall approach to a medium that played (at best) a bit-part at the last General Election has also changed completely.

Through blogs and Twitter, we’ve seen a revolution in the way political parties communicate internally – with sites like ConservativeHome becoming must-reads for party members messaging each other about the political events of the day.

But the big question at this election is how best to use the internet to reach out beyond the people who will already vote for you to the huge number of undecided voters. We know they’re unlikely to be reading the political blogs or following even their local MP on Twitter – so how do you reach them?

Well, we know they’re definitely searching on Google, connecting with friends on Facebook and quite often starting any web browsing session on a portal like MSN or Yahoo to find out what’s going in the world today.

That’s why search plays such a big part in our online strategy. For example, when we relaunched Conservatives.com in 2008, we ensured that the site was properly optimised for search so users could find key policy information easily using Google. And that work paid off, as proven by recent research by the natural search conversion agency Tamar.

And Google Adwords, which allow us to strategically place messages according to users’ search terms, are important too. For example, on Wednesday anyone searching on Budget-related terms from “Alistair Darling” through to “car scrappage scheme” would be presented with an advert for George Osborne’s video response on YouTube.

Research by Diffusion found that our strategy on Facebook has also paid off, with innovations like our “donate your status” campaign during last year’s European elections helping to send our key messages from our supporters on to thousands of undecided voters. PR Week concluded that the Conservative Party “dominates” Facebook, with more supporters on the platform than the other two parties combined.

We’ve also recognised that it’s important to engage with people on the sites they already visit rather than expecting them to come to us. MSN (which reaches an astonishing 50% of the UK online audience) recently played host to an interactive webcast with David Cameron, and we have worked with Mumsnet, LinkedIn, the Army Rumour Service, Money Saving Expert and SAGA in the past few months alone.

Mark Hanson (writing on this very blog) is right to say that it’s important to keep your own supporters informed, and to give them the tools they need to fight a successful election campaign, both offline and online. That’s why we launched MyConservatives.com, which allows our supporters to fundraise and campaign for the candidates they support and the issues they care about.

It’s also why we’ve invested so much in e-mail, which remains by far the best way to get in touch with large groups of supporters. ReturnPath research found we scored a “landslide” victory over the other parties when it comes to e-mail, with Labour going a full 58 days without sending a message to their subscribers.

So, with the election campaign proper just around the corner, it’s going to be an exciting few weeks and I’m looking forward to keeping you up to date on this blog.

Originally posted on Brand Republic’s “Red, Yellow and Blue Blog” at http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/redyellowblue/archive/2010/03/26/69028.aspx

Amid all the buzz about the influence of social networking sites like Twitter on political campaigning, we often forget about how the majority of people in the UK get their news online – through portals like Yahoo and MSN.

With 22 million unique monthly users, MSN (originally the Microsoft Network) reaches approximately 50% of the entire UK online audience. With Windows Live Messenger, MSN’s hugely popular instant messaging program, included the figure reaches 27million. In comparison, Twitter is used by around 3.5m people in the UK every month.

As the default homepage for all PCs shipped with Windows (and that’s a lot of computers), MSN reaches right across the wide online spectrum – including “silver surfers” and casual web users – very many of whom eschew traditional newspapers or TV news.

And that’s why the event we held this week at MSN – a Q&A webcast with David Cameron – was so important. It gave David the opportunity to engage with a really important community that includes a lot of people who will be voting for the first time when the General Election is finally called.

And the level of engagement was very high – we had a huge number of questions come in on a wide range of topics, and the live webcast on Thursday evening (filmed in front of an audience made up mostly of first-time voters) was broadcast to an even bigger online audience.

We’ll be holding a lot more events like this in the run-up to the election as we look to ensure that as many people as possible get the opportunity to put their questions to David and the Shadow Cabinet and hear about our plans to change Britain.

If you missed the MSN event, a replay is available to watch below. And if you want to find out first about future webcast events, click here to sign up for our regular e-mail bulletins.

Originally posted at http://blog.conservatives.com/index.php/2010/02/19/engaging-a-mass-audience-online/