Social media did not have a determining influence on the UK General Election 2010 at any time during the campaign. Aiming for a repeat of the success of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, the three main political parties all hired their own social media specialists. They failed.
The campaign was marked by two events: the TV debates that made Nick Clegg a rock star and the ‘Bigotgate’ that destroyed what was left of Gordon Brown and the Labour. The outcomes of these events were a result of TV and radio - the traditional media.
In comparison, the only notable story that happened through social media was the sacking of a Labour candidate, Stuart MacLennan, because of his Twitter remarks.
So what went wrong with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube? After all, we had heard for months than this was going to be a ‘social media election’. But what does that really mean? The successful use of social media for political campaigns involves two core elements:
1) Voters are your ambassadors. You engage with voters to get your message across, make them adopt it and create it in their own way to tell your story. A message gets a lot more powerful when told with voters’ words.
2) The capacity to leverage your voter base and mobilize it. Consider inviting users to attend events or to use their social media account to send the same message at the same time (e.g. voters giving up their Facebook status to the US democrats on Election Day in November 2008).
Have any of the Big Three done that? Not really. Of course they did the basics and created a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account and a You Tube channel. Even the wife of Gordon Brown did her bit with her SarahBrown10 Twitter account.
But they used it as if it was old media, bombarding voters with messages but not creating any real interaction. Just have a look at the respective Facebook fan page for the Conservatives, the Labour and the Lib Dems. The only thing you can do as a voter is share these messages. It is a very poor level of interaction offered in a post-web 2.0 world.
So what did this generate in terms of users/subscribers/followers for these organisations? The Tories have the biggest audienc with over 106,000 Facebook fans and 36,000 followers on Twitter .These figures are not so impressive considering the reach of social media in this country (the UK has more than 22.5 million Facebook users that are 18+ and London is the Twitter capital of the world).Of course the figures give a lead to the Conservatives, but this has not been translated into a clear victory as Nick Clegg won a Facebook poll of 480,000 users with 42% of the votes.
The fact that none of the political parties have harnessed the power of social media is really a missed opportunity, as voters have been using them intensively. Voters used Twitter to comment live the TV political debate #leadersdebate.
Voters were also incredibly active on Facebook, as Richard Allan, Facebook Head of European policy confirmed it: “More than 260,000 users joined Democracy UK, Facebook’s political hub and nearly half a million people took part in our mock-election poll say who they wanted to be their PM. On May 6th nearly two million Facebook users (out of 26 million voters) clicked our ‘I’ve Voted’ counter.”
If you compared this figure with the 280,000 Facebook user fans of the top 5 political parties, it means that only 14% of potentially interested users have been engaged by political parties.
However, the social media strategist should not take the full blame of the lack of success on these platforms. Other factors can also explain why social media has not played the role they could have fulfilled:
1) No one else is Barack Obama. During his campaign, the current American president became more than a candidate; he was a global symbol of hope and change. And as millions of voters identified themselves with him, it was then easier to mobilise them through social media.
2) The TV political debates made the campaign. That was the first time ever that TV political debate between the Big Three were organised. This means that Britain just entered the 20th century in terms of political campaigns, whereas social media belongs to the 21st century! The TV political debate represented a novelty that reached far more voters than social media (the three debates gathered a cumulative audience of 23 million viewers).
So, you could say that the General Election 2010 has been a rendezvous manqué with social media. But the reality of a hung parliament means that another election could be called in a few months. As the TV political debate will not be such a novelty anymore, social media might set the dynamic of the campaign.
