2010’s General Election is the much vaunted “Internet election”, or so they say. They’ve been saying it for a long time actually, and I’m glad we now get to see what the parties are made of, online as well as off. Let’s be clear: the Internet will undoubtedly affect this year’s election, to what extent and how exactly we don’t know, but at a very minimum the way the politics this year is covered will be different to 2005 and 2001; the 24 hour news cycle will be made even more reactionary by the plethora of blogs and news websites that now exist.
How the politicians and parties themselves are able to influence the outcome on May 6th remains to be seen, but they are obviously trying, although not one of the major parties has put the web at the very heart of their campaign, as the Obama campaign did in 2007/2008 (we need a new e-campaign watershed cliché to refer to already!). Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems have each launched new websites for the election, and I rank them as follows: Conservative number one for design (which is actually crucially important), Labour number two as the new design is quite good and there’s new content every day and LibDems third because their site is a cluttered mess and isn’t very nice looking or engaging.
In terms of non-public web stuff, Labour is leading the way with Membersnet. Membersnet was invented just before I worked on e-campaigns for Labour back when Tony Blair was leader. It has come along leaps and bounds, and is now accessible not just to members but acts as a discussion portal for wider political issues too. Membersnet is used to organise campaigning around the country, provides campaigning information and materials and allows members to canvass people from the comfort of their homes by telephone using Labour’s “virtual phone bank”. The phone bank in itself is a valuable resource, and I applaud Labour’s techies at Tangent for developing something so useful to so many activists.
Clearly a lot of effort is being made, at least by Labour and the Tories in putting the power of the Internet to use in this election. But it all still feels a bit controlled and not as open as it might be. We aren’t in the midst of an e-campaign that will revolutionise politics, like we have seen in other countries. There have been mistakes, namely in my opinion, Labour’s failure to have an open competition process for its poster campaign, which backfired. If the public was invited to create their own posters on the website, then comment on and discuss each other’s submissions, the quality of the outcome would have been better. And yes we might have got a bit of egg on our faces, but so what? We should let loose and have a bit of fun with this and not be afraid of doing so.
This is the thing that needs to change. Labour is having a bit of a battle with itself over how big a role the Internet plays in shaping campaigns. There’s still quite a tight central control over the message coming out of the party, and they are afraid that a user-generated video or poster which might be embarrassing might derail the message. We have to get over this in order to truly harness the power of the web in any given election. I’m sure we will eventually.
Anyway, while we are at it, I have a few suggestions for Labour to improve this year’s online campaign:
1) Have a party staffer, or even a volunteer follow the Prime Minister wherever he is, whenever he is on the campaign trail. This person should be armed with a Flip HD video camera and a high quality digital camera. Photos should be uploaded in real time, from the road using a 3G phone, straight to Flickr. Those photos would then be distributed to the main website made available for anyone to use on their blogs and for the media to use too. This is a very, very low cost, high impact idea. Yes there are bits of photos lying around the site of things Gordon has done since the election began, but the quality is low, there aren’t very many photos and they’re planted on single pages and therefore aren’t very accessible. There’s not even a photo gallery section on the site.
2) A big map on the homepage displaying where the PM has been so far and where he is planned to go in the next few days. Sure there is a security concern telling the public where our Prime Minister will be at any given moment, but isn’t that what his heavily armed police protection are for? Besides, we can be vague in saying where he is going to be. This just gives the public an idea of the scale of the campaign, how much of the country he has visited and where “in my area” the PM might be so I can go and hear what he has to say. Simple and easy, and free using Google maps.
3) “Fireside” or “Jaguar back-seat” chats. That staffer from point 1, with his or her Flip-cam, at least once a day spending ten minutes with the PM in the back of his Jag talking about what happened today, how Gordon is feeling etc. etc. This would show the personal and behind-the-scenes feelings of the campaign, and people like this and respond to it, not least because everything is so polished and so stage managed with modern campaigns. This must be published on the same day it is taken. Hosted on YouTube, edited on the road on a laptop, it really doesn’t take that much effort and can still be done during this election.
4) Diversify! The “inside the campaign” section of Labour’s national website allows the public to read the opinions from inside the campaign, of, namely: Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, Douglas Alexander, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. White, male, middle aged and boring. These people only talk to one section of society, if at all. Perhaps make a bit more effort to show how diverse (and it is very diverse) Labour’s team is (not just ministerial, at the staff level too). Getting some input to this section from candidates around the country, different levels of Labour staff etc. would show that the campaign isn’t as centrally controlled as it looks.
5) Get some control over design. I don’t know what David Miliband’s aides were thinking when they saw the design of this blog and decided it was the one. This is a prominent political figure and his blog should follow suit. With all the free, very well designed blog templates there are out there on sites like Blogger and Wordpress, there’s no excuse for this. Design matters a lot with campaigns, both online and offline on things like posters and leaflets. Great that more people are blogging, but let’s do it properly. We can have Obama levels of quality in our web designs, without spending much or anything at all.
6) More user generated content on the national Labour website would be great. Why not allow people to post their own YouTube videos, their own photos, their own poster ideas, explaining why they support Labour? Labour staff could filter out the nasty stuff, but we mustn’t be afraid of taking some risks. For now, all there is in the way of this is the “Why I’m Labour” page with a very long list of very boring texts from various people around the country. This doesn’t excite anyone, but “The Wall” from the Tory party, although staged, should inspire us to do something similar which would excite people.
So there we go, just a few ideas to improve our online campaign. I do like the new Labour website, and I think it’s by far the best site we have had to-date. But it still has one foot (the larger foot actually) rooted in Web 1.0. The future is Web 2.0, mind the awful cliché, and perhaps the political world in the UK is just not ready for a truly inspirational and open web election. Perhaps it goes against the grain of our system. But people want to engage, follow the campaigns more closely and really get to know the candidates and the party leaders, so we should give them the platform to do so.
