Social Mediation in the UK Election and beyond

Rory Cellan Jones has written a good starter post re: the impact of Social Media in the UK election - key points of impact he saw are:

Engagement

This was the first election where social networking played a part; although the conversation on Twitter may have been restricted to a few hundred thousand political geeks, there is evidence that younger people in particular used these now-familiar forums to engage with the campaign.

Facebook's tie-up with the Electoral Commission to promote voter registration also appears to have been a success, with visits to the registration site soaring after links appeared on users' profiles.


Persuasion

The parties went into the campaign determined to use digital means to reach voters. Both the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, Labour made sophisticated use of Google's AdSense system to place political messages next to search terms.

On polling day, the Tories went one step further, buying what they described as the best piece of online real estate you can find, the front page of YouTube, to place an advert telling users to vote Conservative.

Huge e-mail databases were used to contact voters time and again throughout the campaign with personalised messages from the likes of Gordon, David and Nick.

Meanwhile, the parties were still spending sizeable amounts on that traditional election tool, the poster campaign - only to find that just about every poster was swiftly amended by online spoofers.

Did any of this make a jot of difference? Hard to say, but that's also the case with the old media methods.

Organisation

One dull, but important, aspect of the internet election was the way the parties used e-mail, text

One Conservative candidate told me that campaign meetings had been rendered obsolete by the new methods. We watched teams of eager canvassers, some of whom had been recruited via Facebook, fan out across the constituency, led by a very young campaign manager who had studied American methods.


News cycle

For anyone watching the campaign closely, the blogs and social networks - particularly Twitter - provided a fascinating running commentary from an array of mostly partisan viewpoints.

That seemed to make every event, from the TV debates to the "bigoted woman" row, happen at warp speed - so that, after a few hours, it was time to move on to something new.

But did these new media sources actually provide breaking news stories? Apart from the odd Twitter gaffe, not really. Nor did amateur footage shot on mobile phones change the course of the campaign.

I think the #nickcleggsfault riposte on Twitter pretty much stopped the anti-LibDem spin that day. As Rory notes:

So it wasn't an election won or lost by the internet, but nor was it untouched by the technology. New voters appeared to enjoy their first experience of an election campaign, and will now expect to engage with future elections via the web.

To me though the interesting thing to watch is the evolution of the "First Past the Post" voting system. As you can see by the chart at the top, the Liberal Democrats, the UK's 3rd biggest party, hit nearly a quarter of the votes cast, and yet only managed to get 9% of the seats. In fact they lost 10% of their seats from the last election despite increasing their share of the vote by 1% point this time.

It is my view that this system will come under huge pressure, and that Social Media will be a major force putting it under pressure, for main 2 reasons:

(i) A lot of the LibDem support are on Social Media systems - their support as massively higher online, and online people make a lot of noise

(ii) It is very clear that online techniques will allow the vote to be distributed far more easily in a more representative way. With these disparities - and also the very major decisions that need to be made going forward - people who are not Tory or labour will demand a voice. Fiascos like people not being able to vote because the voting booths shut at 10pm despite the queues will exacerbate this.

Incidentally, you may see that we noted earlier that the LibDems support online was far greater than the MSM polls were suggesting - and the MSM polls were suggesting far larger LibDem support than turned up - and we wondered (and there was evidence) that Floating Voters were LibDem. There was an the apparent connection between Floating Voters and being Online). It appears however that the LibDem surge vote largely evaporated, which means you can have 3 hypotheses for this online surge:

- Online people are predominantly Liberal Democrat anyway, so you were just seeing existing support.

- There was about a 1% shift in LibDem vote (about 300,000 people) - and that was the impact of the online community voting

- There are many people who talk Socialist and vote Capitalist

There is definitely someything rotten in the social media woodshed here - ie something does not add up. Answers, as they say, on a postcard......................