Yesterday I was in techno-political geek heaven. The Personal Democracy Forum, with the help of Onalytica, had organised ‘General Election Replay’. The e-glitterati panel which had been assembled were ready to be grilled in Question Time style.

It quickly became apparent that the question of whether this was an ‘internet election’ is a redundant one. The internet is a part of the fabric of our society. It is a tool that is inextricably intertwined with the work that politicians and journalists do. As Mark Pack pointed out, if the internet had suddenly disappeared half-way through the election everyone would have had to completely rethink how they operated.

The Conservatives and Labour had two very different approaches to the technological side of campaigning. Craig Elder told us how the Conservatives e-strategy was decide upon over two years ago. It was based on creating a website that was policy-based and easy to navigate. The goal was for floating voters to be directed towards information that CCHQ wanted them to see. This involved buying space on Youtube’s front page and enabling targetted search engine results. If you were looking for political information during April it is more likely than not that you would have come across Tory-friendly messages. Labour, as Mark Hanson explained, concentrated on energising and organising their base. The internet is a place where people gravitate towards themselves. By exploiting this, Labour managed to mobilise activists then target them at key seats. Compared to 2005, Labour employed one-third the number of staff but had three times the amount of activists.

E-influencing is about the size of the network times the power and tools inside the network. If these three parts are not aligned any impact will be significantly lessened. The Lib Dems did not have the capacity to take advantage of the surge in interest that Nick Clegg generated post TV-debate. Onalytica’s research showed that while the buzz around Clegg himself increased rapidly after the first debate the noise around his party was static. If only they had had an equivalent to Myconservatives. This was an impressive tool but unfortunately for the Tories there was no power/buzz to make it the game changer it could have been.

Twitter created the most heated part of the debate. Samuel Coates described Twitter as a giant echo chamber, which generated a huge amount of heat but not a lot of light. While this is spot-on those who think it proves the futility of tweeting have missed the point that Twitter’s power is derived from this analysis. Energising your base and channelling its power is a crucial part of election strategy. This is how Obama successfully used social media; to enthuse then direct supporters. During the campaign I downloaded both parties I-Phone apps. The Conservative one gave me useful information while the Labour app asked me to join in. It had a local news and local events section which encouraged supporters to spread targeted messages to applicable audiences.

Twitter has made spinning a naked art. In Harry Cole’s view twitter gave the parties an extra thousand spinners. Mick Fealty rightly pointed out Twitter radically changed how spinning works. For example, I follow Alastair Campbell. During the leaders debate he tweeted the prepared line that while Brown was losing on style he was wining on substance. Forget the spin room or political operators having a word in correspondences ears; Campbell was directly spinning at me. Both Toryites and Labourites do do their master’s spinning but it is completely transparent that you are being fed biased views. If you are on Twitter and want to get a flavour of the grassroots debate, but don’t want to follow thousands, I can highly recommend @HouseofTwits. It is the best grassroots political aggregator out there.

What about the future? Joe Trippi believes we will end up in a place where it will be impossible to control information. I think we are already half-way there. Anthony Painter suspects that the Internet and social media are helping to create a much more fragmented electorate. If progressive politics is about engagement then the tools we have today make interaction so much easier. Stella Creasey, Labour MP, kept making the strong point that it is not about the forums you use but how you use them. In some ways the Labour Party has a more natural fit with social media. It has always seen itself as a movement and the internet is a Darwinian battle of competing movements all trying to get the maximum momentum. Will Labour be able to regenerate itself through e-debate or will this easier interaction allow the loud shouting loons to dominate sensible instincts? We shall see.

From the coalition government’s perspective how will social media allow supporters to interact with this new politics? On Tuesday politics changed but how we have the political conversation has yet to catch-up.

All the parties had e-successes and e-failures, which I’m sure they all learnt from. This will undoubtedly help to advance e-campaigning BUT if the next election is in five years it is probable that the influential platforms of 2015 have yet to be invented.

During a campaign every party strives to gain media coverage. According to some bloggers there is a battle raging between ‘new’, online forms of communication, and ‘old’, static ways of transmitting news. The truth is more incestuous. Many political blogstars and tweetterati are paid-up members of the media elite. Paul Waugh, Benedict Brogan, Nick Robinson, the list goes on. Technology may be facilitating a power shift between a newspaper and its journalist. Reporters are building up their own fan base. I don’t read the Standard but I follow @paulwaugh on twitter. I don’t buy the Telegraph but I RSS feed Ed West’s blog.

The 2005 election campaign showed that people got online news from established media outlets. A staggering 78% of all election related internet news traffic went to the BBC. The 2010 landscape is different, but not drastically so. There are a few established internet-based political heavy weights, such as Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale, but even they need the ‘dead tree press’ to give them a significant audience and, thus, influence. Alan Duncan would not have been demoted if the video that showed him complaining that MPs are forced to live on rations had stayed only on-line. Damien McBride would not have been forced to resign if the Sunday Times had not followed up blogger evidence.

While the main media will still trump non-main stream commentators in terms of impact, the cross-pollination does give the online world much more chance to influence the agenda. At its best, bloggers can find and drive a story to a conclusion that it would never have come to without the online impetus. Journalists know that the blogosphere can provide good copy and scour it accordingly.

Energising the Base

The internet is unlikely to be responsible for directly affecting the opinions of swing voters. The utopian vision of the internet is that it would facilitate disintermediation. In a political context this means voters actively seeking information on political issues, rather than passively accepting what is fed to them by traditional information gatekeepers. There is no evidence to suggest that this situation has occurred. In the 2005 election only 3.5% of the public visited a party website. The two most important campaigning events each day will still be the morning newspapers and the 10 o’clock news.

It is a political urban myth that Barak Obama ran an internet-dominated campaign. Tapping into the power of social networking was an important component of his strategy but it boosted ‘traditional’ techniques, such as big TV advert buys and set-piece speeches, rather than overshadowing them. The internet was used to energise his supporters. It was easier for people to donate money to his cause. His online operation also helped to co-ordinate the massive door-to-door operation, which the Obama campaign unleashed on the streets of purple states.

The reality of the internet is that people choose to receive information from like-minded sources. Bloggers mainly link to similarly partisan sites. There is a stark lack of non-partisan voices in the political blogasphere. If you followed the #TrevCam twitter feed, which enabled people to comment on the Trevor McDonald interview of David Cameron as it unfolded, it would not have taken you long to realise that all those who contributed had a strong pre-disposed opinion. The same twitters could have had exactly the same “Cameron is great” “Cameron is rubbish” debate without the need for the programme. This partisan engagement is potentially a powerful tool for parties as they will be able to feed information to their supporters and encourage them to do more than they maybe would have. The dangers are that messages cannot be controlled or activists will believe that writing a blog post/commenting on Conservativehome is an adequate replacement for time spent pounding the street.

Influencing the Internal Debate

If you are still reading this post you are either my family (Hi Dad) or a political activist. We are all influencing each other. The biggest direct impact of political networking is in facilitating a multitude of debates within parties. Groups can create a space that they populate with a platform that they believe can help their party campaign and govern effectively (BTW you can now follow @platformten on twitter). While the average person has never heard of Conservativehome the average Tory MP/PPC/CCHQ staffer will constantly observe the site’s direction of travel. The major issue for parties in trying to harness these debates is to find the balance between leading and being led. It’s worth remembering that the online world mirrors the real world in that those who shout the loudest and longest are not necessarily right or relevant.

Conclusion

One of the things I will reflect upon at the end of election campaign is how new media has risen to the challenge of being a part of the process. In the 2005 election the internet was an infant, relying almost exclusively on the support provided by the mainstream media. In this election the internet is in its teenage period. It wants to break free from its old-fashioned parents. While it does have a certain level of independence it still relies, begrudgingly, on the support of those it is trying to break away from. I’m sure at times there will be the odd hissy-fit. Will we have a stand-alone internet based election by 2014? We shall see.

Great fun interviewing David yesterday – though I’ve never been to Birmingham and turned straight round to come home before… The article will be in April’s edition of Company magazine which will be on sale in mid-March.

One of the things we talked about was how politicians are using new media. I came across this website today (thanks to the Coffee House) which is just great.  At the moment the first interview that starts playing is Zac Goldsmith’s but that will change as more candidates upload their videos.

Along with Derek Wyatt’s iPhone app, this got me thinking… Can technology ever win an election? Should it? Is it only politics geeks who go reading political websites, and watching political videos, and searching out political information? How do most people decide who to vote for? Is face to face engagement with either the prospective MP or their hard-working canvassers and leaflet deliverers the most effective way to reach out to people, or are tv, radio, newspaper and internet interviews and spots enough?

The WinkBall website is clearly based on the premise that face to face is better than just leaflets. But it is still after all only on a computer screen, and there’s no knowing how interactive it really is.

I think the real genius of blogs, websites, forums, Facebook and so on is not that it is ON A COMPUTER so you can do it from home, but that you can answer back. Politics used to be all about the politicians telling you what they thought and then you would vote for them and then you might, if you were lucky, see that they delivered what they said. But the way people use the internet means that politicians are much more accountable than they used to be and it looks terrible if they ignore questions or issues that people raise.

That’s why the transparency agenda is so important. Instead of waiting until it’s dragged out, piece by piece, under Freedom of Information or because it’s leaked, the Conservatives’ plans to publish government contracts, data and other information is, as I’ve said before, probably the most radical thing they will do if they are elected to government. It will completely change the relationship between politicians and voters – which, as things stand, can only be a good thing.

So my conclusion, such as it is, is this. These sorts of applications are important because they offer a different and sometimes eye-catching way to communicate. But they are most important because they break down the barriers between politicians and voters in the same way that meeting in person does. It’s not the fact that you can see the person that makes the difference – it’s the fact that you can talk back. In our ever-less reverential society, this is what makes us all accountable to each other.

As an aside, I heard a terrible story about a very well-known Labour MP this week – apparently she does all her surgeries in her local council offices… from behind the bullet-proof glass that the cashiers sit behind. Why she thinks this is in any way appropriate is beyond me – it’s nearly as bad as Harriet Harman’s flak jacket on a constituency tour...

I’m a fan of Left Foot Forward.  It is amongst the list of ‘must read’ blogs.  But in an article a few days ago, they completely misunderstood the nature of the Tory blogosphere.

Sam Coates et al arranged a fairly informal get together for bloggers on Tuesday, at which Eric Pickles gave a short and very entertaining speech. The normally excellent Left Foot Forward added a blog based on a fiction.  According to LFF, the disparate and varied Tory blogosphere will now be marching with the discipline and unity of a well drilled battalion – apparently driven on by 7 AM briefings that they will be expected to parrot.  This is, of course, totally untrue.  Nothing even remotely of the kind was said at the event.  In fact, the independence of the blogosphere was loudly celebrated.

There are two important points here.  The first is that what Will Straw alleged was said absolutely wasn’t said.  The second is that it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Tory blogosphere.  The truth is that the Tory blogosphere is highly independent and highly diverse. The idea that blogs from the progressive centre such as this one will start singing from exactly the same hymn sheet as some of the blogs on the right wing fringe is absurd.

What Straw fails to note and comprehend is that internet and the blogosphere has resulted in the greatest proliferation of sources of news, information and opinion for centuries.  Not since the time of the likes of Cobbett’s Political Register and Marat’s L’Ami Du Peuple has such a range of political opinions (from the sensible to the crackpot) been able to reach a wider audience.

In such an uncontrolled environment as the internet and the blogosphere, central control verges between difficult and impossible.  As Joe Trippi’s brilliant ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ makes clear, the internet and the blogosphere are, by their very nature bottom up rather than top-down.  It is part of the left’s misunderstanding of the blogosphere that they think any kind of central control is even being considered.