Blogging and tweeting to election victory
Posted on January 6, 2010
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The next general election in the UK hasn’t been announced yet but we know it will be sometime before May this year and the various parties have begun the year in earnest. But what effect will the internet have on the election?
A recent post on one of my favourite blogs (BBC dot.life) was discussing the what the effect of YouTube might be on the forthcoming UK General Election, another article in the Guardian discusses how blogging and tweeting will be used by the parties themselves as well as their supporters (and presumably their detractors). It seems strange but YouTube was only about 3 months old at the time of the last election, and Twitter still a few years from development but some believe the forthcoming election (expected to be one of the closest of recent years) will be defined by the internet and social media in particular.
It certainly seemed to have an effect in the US Presidential election last year when Obama swept to power. The majority of his campaign funding ($500m) came from small online donations and people watched around 14 million hours of Obama related footage on YouTube. But (with no offence intended!) American’s are different creatures from the reserved British where many people still refuse to say who they vote for and certainly wouldn’t campaign to all their friends on Facebook would they? There can be no doubt that the people are there to be found on all the popular networks – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube etc but just because users can access this content so easily doesn’t mean they will (you can drag a horse to water but can’t make it drink…). That requires an attitude change which I can’t see having happened yet and I will be bold enough to go so far as to say that I don’t think we’ll see a massive change in the voting numbers at the next election.
That’s not to say that blogging, twittering and uploading video content aren’t worth the time it takes to do; people certainly use these networks and the cost is still relatively minimal. I personally can’t wait to see how the parties use these networks in the coming months and more importantly how people react to them.
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