Social Media won’t win the UK election, but…
April 6th, 2010It will help, that is what the BBC and a host of social new
sites are saying but I’m not sure I agree with it.
The 2010 UK General Election will be known as the first time political parties will use social media as a significant part of their overall campaign strategy – and it makes sense, after all social media is all about communicating your opinions to the world.
I personally wonder though if it will be as big an impact as everyone is making out. Today Facebook has millions of users worldwide, and most of them thanks to Smartphone’s and WIFI are on it constantly. The novelty of it has worn off, it’s just another tool now like mobile phones or the internet rather than the funky or fashionable new thing.
So a party will have a Facebook and a Twitter page, so what? Brands and celebrities have been doing it for years now – and they have the advantage of their content being interesting and relevant to their fans. Politics won’t have that advantage, to the usual teen facebooker politics is still politics regardless of the shiny new 2.0 cover.
Another big problem I can see are parties alienating the more traditional voter, who prefers debates on the telly or an actual representative to come visit your door and talk about their policies face to face, rather than seeing a generic ‘vote for us’ video on YouTube.
I’m not saying I don’t agree with it, if fact I would like it to work for them – but they’ve never done it before on this scale and things can go badly wrong if they’re not careful. A party using social must avoid just plastering their pages with worthless generic information copied from publications or stats reports and communicate simply and personally with a view to discuss, encouraging interaction and feedback.
Unlike RSPCA and now Nestle, they’ll have to make sure that any negative feedback is handled correctly with relevant comments and ‘agree to disagree’ language. If they start deleting negative feedback and fans the news will spread thick and fast, and hundreds of comments appearing on your page criticising your actions will certainly affect the votes.
Personally on reflection no matter how much they utilise social, I wouldn’t expect it to revolutionise elections or politics now or in the future – considering how much social has now ingrained on our lives I think the parties felt they needed to use it, rather than choosing to use it.
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hard fast rules on how to interact with users. Whilst most companies learn by trial and error, a few have learned the hard way that responding to a social media PR crisis can prove very difficult in a world which holds freedom of expression as its underlying concept.
Thirdly, don’t just delete comments. If this proves necessary due to the nature of the post, you should issue a short statement explaining why it has been removed. Contacting the user personally also ensures they are aware of your guidelines and are given the chance to express themselves should they still wish to, without inappropriate language.

