Was it social media wot won it?
An interesting variety of views are coming out regarding the effect of social media on the election. As the Guardian put it yesterday, on Friday after the result has been declared will we be saying “it was Facebook wot won it” or “Twitter that tipped it?”
First, some reflections about the Obama campaign, which has set the benchmark. The stats show that Obama had loads more supporters on Facebook and Twitter than John McCain. It’s also a known fact that Twitter users were overwhelmingly Democrat supporters in almost every state. Since they tend to be a young demographic, there’s an implied link between youth and progressive politics. But Obama didn’t win every state, as the Guardian’s Charles Arthur reminds us, probably because it’s more likely to be older folk who take the trouble to vote – his success really came from email campaigns.
So in theory, it’s Labour and the Libdems who should be making the running on social networking sites, even if that doesn’t translate directly into electoral success. The Libdems are indeed doing well in terms of numbers. One survey shows that social media is having an especially significant impact among Liberal Democrat voters across the country – who also favour Facebook more than the other supporters. Yet Labour has been left standing in the social media stakes by the other two parties, it adds, and to make matters even less clear, social media has been dominated by the Conservative viewpoints which have broadly mirrored the attitudes of the electorate.
So no obvious patterns there, and zero chance that this crazy new medium will be credited with having swung the 2010 British general election. But what did we really expect, asks tech blogger Nick Clayton, who thinks the whole concept of a social media election campaign was “ludicrous from the start”.
‘Did anybody seriously believe that a largely disillusioned electorate was somehow going to be galvanised into mass political action or, at least, mass tweeting? Why were so many variations on this view apparently taken seriously in the run-up to the campaign?’
Probably, he says, because in the phony war before the election campaign media pundits were simply trying to fill column inches. The reality is that it’s a combination of traditional and digital media that count, and no one channel predominates.
But if the impact on the election is likely to have been limited, it’s clear that social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is likely to have a growing effect on political activity in this country. The kind of direct voter participation we have been seeing during the campaign, with interested citizens able to comment in real time on the leaders’ debates, for instance, or providing instant responses to Bigotgate, will mean politicians will in future have to be much lighter on their feet.
May 5th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Perhaps the most interesting point with regard to social media is that the parties all spent the run up to the campaign telling us they’d be focusing on social media – as a means of suggesting they were innovative and hip.
Where commentators were wrong in predicting the importance of social media in the 2010 UK election, this was mostly due to a lack of understanding of the differences between campaigning in a vast, diverse territory with distinct and expensive regional media markets (the US) and campaigning in a more concentrated environment where news is still sourced from the same, limited, set of outlets as in the past and where local party organisations are relatively strong.
I’m sure social media will become more important in future elections, but they need to develop and mature somewhat before they become the dominant channels.