Posts Tagged ‘ecampaigning’

John Prescott's twitter page

I was just pointed to a really interesting gallery on The Independent’s website titled Twitter’s speedy move to the centre of politics. The gallery is compiled with the help from the team at Tweetminister, which is a really useful resource that lists all tweeting MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).

What I really find interesting about it and is obviously the point of the gallery, is the evolution of twitter use by Parliamentarians. Initially, when I first joined twitter around 18 months ago, I think there were only one, maybe two MPs tweeting. Now according to the Independent, there are at least 66 MPs tweeting - 10% of the Commons. What’s even more exciting is that the vast majority of those MPs are active tweeters. Sure you have MPs such as @HarrietHarman who hasn’t tweeted since May and there is Shahid Malik (@DewsburyMP) who has never posted, but you also have avid users such as Kerry McCarthy [Lab] - Bristol East with 2623 updates, Jo Swinson [LD] - East Dunbartonshire with 1503 and of course Tom Watson [Lab] - West Bromwich East with 2368. There are apparently also 13 Ministers tweeting away.

Some MPs have even got so involved they have tinted their profiles green in support of the Iranian protestors. This may be a slightly questionable in terms of foreign policy decisions, but the fact is these MPs actively involved in the political social media revolution.

Most surprisingly, possibly in the majority of cases, it is actually them tweeting and not a researcher hidden away in Portcullis house as proven by @JoSwinson who tweets from the Chamber. And they reply if you contact them.

So the moral here is that there is a growing awareness of the power of twitter and social media in Westminster and this is surely going to grow. Twitter, facebook and other tools are becoming more and more legitimate ways to contact and engage with MPs and other key decision makers. I can only guess about what is to come especially in the lead up to the General Election

A number of my colleagues and I went to an lecture from Thomas Gensemer, part of the online team behind Barack Obama’s grassroots and fundraising success. Arguably, Obama’s online campaign will become the ultimate case study of the benefits of online campaigning and Gensemer was a significant contributor to this success.

What was personally interesting was that the basis of the Obama strategy lay in the importance of constant personal contact and simplicity. Gensemer made the very valid point that regular email newsletters, no matter the quality, are rarely consistently read by the majority of recipients. There were 7000+ messages sent out to Obama supporters over the course of the campaign and all averaged less than 300 words, all with the aim of getting “feet on the ground”.

The ultimate objective of the online campaigning was to create local, on-the-ground activism, so each request was aimed at getting the recipients to do something, whether that is volunteering at the local campaign office, knock on doors, leaflet or donate money. Hence, the huge amounts of funds raised and the huge number of volunteers and local organisers.

The individual touch was also vitally important and this was achieved through personalised replies. If a volunteer replied to one of the mail-outs, Gensemer said that their aim was to get a personalised reply back within 3-4 days.

It was a fascinating insight into online political campaigning, but the beauty of its simplicity means that aspects of the strategy could potentially be transferable to a good deal of what we do as public affairs and public relations professionals.

Much of our work is issue related, or can at least be linked or incorporated into issues. Therefore aspects of the Obama online campaigning strategy could be transferred across the areas of politics, global advocacy, patient group outreach, product promotion and the list goes on.

Therefore online campaigning and interaction is a fantastic tool and if done properly, can be extraordinarily powerful and transferable to a number of sectors. It is certainly something we, as communications specialists should all be getting a handle on.