This morning I heard that the Electoral Commission and Democracy UK have teamed up so that every Facebook user in the UK will, from tomorrow, be asked if they are registered to vote, and offer the option to print a registration form. Then, on the way to the office, it was a ‘take a look at the website’ that stood out from the other political rants of  campaigning candidates that prompted me to take a flyer from an independent candidate.

The aforementioned website had all the usual links to twitter, the candidates’ blog and YouTube videos, but was, in all honesty, nothing special.

It got me thinking, how well is social media being leveraged by the political parties in the run up to the election? At first glance you might think fairly well, we’re not talking Barack Obama well but, still, fairly well. Labour have their twitter czar and there are repeated reports in the media of how the conservatives have more fans than everyone else on facebook.

But taking a closer look they all seem to be missing the point. Labour’s ‘twitter czar’, Kerry McCarthy’s tweet at 5.28pm yesterday, “This may be the first tweet sent from the House of Lords! It’s prorogation… rather bizarre ceremony.”, isn’t exactly engaging. I’m guessing ‘prorogation’ means little to the voting public and, more importantly, even less to the non-voting public.

Is twitter being leveraged to maximum effect?

Many of the tweets from the Labour and Conservative read like childish, albeit eloquent, playground taunts; ‘The Tory economic strategy – tell someone it’s not true’ and ‘Labour have failed to stop children starting a life of crime. Most of those released from custody reoffend within a year’. That’s not to say twitter hasn’t created a great forum for political discussion but with a little thought and creativity that forum could have much greater reach.

Obama admitted last year that he had never used twitter but, aside from his ‘rockstar’ status drawing followers, with a constant stream of interesting narrative style tweets he clearly knows some people that do.

Before engaging in any social media activity we would always ask clients to think ‘why should people care?’ – if you are planning to leverage such social networking platforms you’ll need to appeal to the audience there, speak in their language, etc.

A brief look at the top three election contenders’ facebook pages is a bland experience. I’d suggest that only the most staunch party followers are likely to publicly become ‘fans’ of such lacklustre facebook pages. I often quote the likes of Dominos in reference to how to facebook can be used to effectively. Their pages are filled with interactive content that you want to share – I guarantee you will spend more time there than on the facebook pages of any of the political parties! If you disagree, pizza’s on me.

Marmite are perhaps a better example of how to leverage both social media and the current election in a way that engages an audience;  follow the links from the Marmite News Network to take look.

At the end of the day it all comes back to content and the presentation thereof. More importantly, there has to be consideration for whom that content is intended and then ensuring it is both relevant and engaging for that audience. Political parties, you would imagine, should have a clear understanding of the audiences they are targeting and the media channels that engage those audiences.

But maybe they don’t or they would realise that the majority of young new voters are not going to be inclined to become twitter followers or facebook fans of their current offerings, much less diggers of ‘Sowing The Seeds of The Big Society’ or sharers of various campaign pledges.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.