Tag Archives: Online campaigns

I’ll scream the next time I read a Labour person making facile comments about Obama’s online campaign

If you’ve come across this blog entry while searching Google for Damian McBride I suggest you take a look at this from Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy or this from Tom Harris MP – they delve more into the depths of the McBride issue than I do. If you want analysis of UK online campaigning then read on…
Wire Tangle - CC / Flickr

Wire Tangle - CC / Flickr

Barack Obama. Oh isn’t he wonderful! Well, yes, he is as far as I am concerned. It still makes me smile each and every time I see him on TV, happy as I am that, not only is George Bush no longer President, but that’s he’s an interesting and optimistic person capable of making great speeches.

But I am completely and utterly sick of British commentators citing Barack Obama’s online campaign and how wonderful that was. The latest example is a post today on LabourList by Gabe Trodd who reckons a Blogspot blog and a committee is going to help matters. Yet that doesn’t quite match this from the LME newsletter a couple of months back:

Well, website fundraising was not well known in America either a  decade ago, so it is perhaps worth trying. Indeed, Labour candidates  for Yorkshire in next year’s European elections already have a  fundraising function through PayPal on their website www.labour4yorkshire.eu

Then there’s Will Straw popping up here, there, and, everywhere expounding on how Labour better learn the lessons of Obama.

Get a grip folks. Even the Atheist Bus Campaign probably raised more than UK political parties ever have online! There’s some way to go.

There are a few things that have to happen before any decent online campaign can develop in the UK, and indeed anywhere else in Europe. Until some of these happen stop drawing parallels with Obama.

  1. Find some politicians ready to take risks. Obama was nowhere in the primary race, had to take risks, and doing things online was one way. Segolène Royal’s Désirs d’Avenir was a bit interesting in France for the same reason. Where are the UK politicians willing to take risks online?
  2. You need to have a decent and positive message to motivate activists – why should they want to be part, to feel part of your campaign? There’s scant little optimism anywhere in British politics at the moment; that has to change before you can motivate people either online or offline. This message starts from the very top and Damian McBride style individuals are never going to generate a positive buzz around politics.
  3. Command and control of party messages has to be abandoned to a certain extent, and debate about policy has to be conducted within the party, within organisations and think tanks, and also online. UK parties need to abandon some of their attachment to brand at the very least. There are ways to contribute to party politics that do not only entail delivering thousands of interminably boring leaflets.

These are all matters of politics, leadership, ideology, party political dynamics and communication. None are remotely linked to technology. Blue State Digital may have done a good job for Obama, but they had the right circumstances in which to work. Until British politics – and Labour in particular – can look at some of the fundamentals then there will be scant little progress.

And please, please, stop citing Obama. It’s doing a great man a disservice.

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Is Labour’s brand too tarnished to use for online campaigns?

picture-9A post at the Fabians’ Next Left blog caught my eye, flagging up a new Labour Party website initiative called Labourspace.com. Next Left compares the site to Change.org in the USA. But there’s a vital difference: branding and design. While the Labour site is all red and yellow and very visibly something from a political party (with a Labour logo on it), Change.org is absolutely not – there’s not even a mention of the Democrats on the site’s about page.

With that in mind, is anyone except a party hack going to use the tools that Labourspace.com offers? Sadly I think that the answer to that is a no.

picture-10Let’s take an example from Change.org – Make The Grid Green in 10 Years. Would an indiviual who cared about this have any incentive to use the Labour tools? Probably not. Because anyone that does not identify directly with the party would immediately suspect something that’s on a Labour site. Someone who cared about something like that could establish their own campaign site (as we chose to do for Atheist Bus) or join an established organisation with more coherency in a sector than the Labour Party has.

Labour has to decisively think about the results that it wants, not the logo on the site on the way to achieving those results. It was the same with Better With Labour that I posted about some 9 months ago. It’s not that the tools are wrong, it’s just that I think Labour’s communications record over the last decade means that the party’s brand is so tarnished that any site prominently displaying the logo is going to face an uphill task to be successful.

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Political PR and the age of the web

Diffusion PR SloganHow should PR professionals use the web? That’s one of the issues I read up on in order to better advise political clients with regard to the websites I produce as a freelancer. My main starting point in the UK has been Daljit Bhurji’s blog (many moons ago Daljit and I used to write for the same student newspaper). His refrain is that PR firms have failed to grasp the benefits of using the web to create communications opportunities, and he’s started his own agency (Diffusion PR) to try to offer specialised services in London. He cites an article by Paul Holmes as one of the sources of inspiration for the new agency, and one line of that particularly caught my attention:

Meanwhile, the annual Trust Barometer surveys conduced by international public relations firm Edelman continue to show that in major markets around the world, people increasingly find “a person like you” to be the most credible source of information: more credible by far than paid advertising and even earned media coverage.

Apply that to politics and what do you get? Most politics has always been based on that ‘person like you’ principle. Candidates for positions go around knocking on doors and attending rallies at election time. Meet the person, see the face, shake the hand, build the rapport. The problem is that doesn’t work as well as it used to – does anyone believe the politicians as much as they used to?

Throwing money at the problem is no good. However much Labour invests in a website like Better With Labour no-one is going to believe it. A site like NHS Blog Doctor or Random Acts of Reality is much more credible (and, I suspect, has many more visitors). Even if you put a comment function on your site – like the Jim Murphy’s blog – you can suffer the same fate (just with the opportunity for ranters to sound off).

Extrapolate all of that to EU politics and the potential for using the internet for political ends is even greater. MEPs can’t possibly meet their entire electorate. But really using the internet to inspire and communicate, and generate conversations about politics? It’s possible. With a shoestring budget we’ve managed to show what can be done with whodoicall.eu – 2 bloggers, 200 Euro and a bunch of folks on Facebook and we end up in IHT. The guys at Fleishman-Hillard in Brussels are making a good effort at introducing clients to Web 2.0 but I suspect no MEPs could afford them. Puffbox is doing interesting work in the London political arena. But in Brussels?

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