Will British Pollies Get More Web Savvy In Wake of MyBO etc.?

The Obama campaign’s use of online social networks has already gained legendary status, and is being looked back on as a monumental watershed moment in way politicians engage with voters. This New York Times article outlines what he did – not just setting up a Facebook page with some thumbs up, down-with-the-kids photos and fake-sounding blog posts, but creating a bespoke platform called MyBO (ingenious Myspace/Bebo mashup there), and committing to sustained engagement with the site’s users that made people feel valuable.

“Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work”, says lawyer and blogger Ranjit Mathoda.

McCain on the other hand (despite his daughter Meghan blogging about Stereolab) just had some lame Flash games on his site – not the sort of thing you’re going to get viral about. As Justine Lam, Ron Paul’s former internet director, said in the MIT Tech Review: “His social-networking site was poorly done, and people found there was nothing to do on it. It was very insular, a walled garden. You don’t want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people”.

So are the British leadership candidates taking stock of all of this? What do their social networking tools look like? Cameron raised some laughs at the Conservative conference this year by highlighting his Facebook groups like “David Cameron is a hottie”, but is that laughter part of a dangerously lazy attitude towards a legitimate form of political advocacy? The Conservatives’ site – conservatives.com – is rarely updated with fresh blog content, and has a pseudo-interactive video testimony “Wall” that it turns out the public can’t actually contribute to. I feel so valued!

Labour actually has plenty to recommend it. The labourspace site that blends campaigning with social networking is particularly strong, allowing people to engage with and generate debate surrounding specific issues that are interesting to them, from gay marriage to carbon footprints.

What’s lacking is promotion, but more importantly personality from both sides. Cameron and Brown should be all over their party’s material, but at the moment it feels faceless. Obama won thanks to a personality-led campaign – Brown and Cameron’s web efforts will definitely suffer if there’s no face or humanity for people to latch onto.

Maybe we’re just more cynical and less evangelical in this country, and perhaps neither of the candidates will inspire people, especially young people, to spread the word. But at the moment, both parties web presences seem awkwardly shoehorned into the internet, and consequently have negligible roles to play in the political debate. When they start to actually believe in the power of online communities, then maybe people will start to engage.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | November 13, 2008 2:47PM |