#VOJ10: Political parties as publishers can sidestep media online, says Conservative social media head

The idea of 2010's UK general election as an "internet election" was put to one side at today's Value of Journalism Conference as representatives from the three main political parties discussed how social media and digital communication tools were turning parties into publishers.

Email, search engine optimisation and affiliate marketing were central to the Conservative election campaign, said Rishi Saha, the party's head of social media. Not necessarily tactics that would interest media commentators or voters, he suggested, but a strategy that grew the party’s email list from 20,000 at the last election to half a million during the 2010 campaign.

Circulation of half a million is topped by only two UK newspapers’ print circulations, he added: "Having that direct reach is an incredible thing."

Mark Pack, who runs the Liberal Democrat Voice blog, agreed, adding the example of Lynne Featherstone MP, who's combination of online presence and offline campaigning gave her a bigger direct audience than local media could provide. "This side-stepping of the media is something we've seen very strikingly at local level," said Pack.

While 'new' media tools have enabled this "side-stepping" to a certain extent, there is also a need to use them to break politics away from the "Westminster bubble". This means a publishing strategy, as explained by Saha: "There's a perceived wisdom that this is how the internet works and there's an identikit way of running an internet strategy. Whichever organisation or brand you are you’ve got to pick and choose the tools you use. You have to own it an make decisions about what’s effective for you."

But there is an additional need not to create a "social media bubble" and ensure that parties' publishing and communications efforts address both those using new media and those beyond, he added.

"How many people out of the 10 or 11 million who watched the TV debates were tweeting on the leaders debate hashtag? Thirty-six thousand, [and] there are fewer than 50,000 reading political bloggers," he said.

"If you are running a numbers-led campaign, the numbers don't stack up. We had to try and increase the supply of people into that market like any publisher. We had to try and break out of that very small number of people on Twitter and beyond hashtags."

Fellow panellist Douglas Alexander MP, election co-ordinator for the Labour Party, said he and the party had over-anticipated the role that the internet would play in the election.

"I had genuinely anticipated that more stories would break through blogs and Twitter than was the case (…) I don’t diminish the fact that social media matters. But I would stress the fact that social media is where the conversation happens and not the conversation [itself]. It's easy to be injected by the belief that it’s only people who are online that matter. They matter, but they’re not the only people who vote," he said.

"Many of these traditional forms of media still matter. There's part of the electorate who will be swayed by online presence, but a larger part will be swayed by continuous offline communications during and after the election."

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