[This is a live blog of the event. As ever, any errors or omissions are entirely my fault]
Opening addresses
Craig Elder (Conservative Party): The first question is was this Obama election? The answer is no, because it is unsuited to UK politics. Hard to turn political parties round. Two and a half years ago we built a website organised around policy aimed at floating voters. It turned out to be a TV election.
Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole): Coalitions are something we are used in Ireland North and South. This is a really intelligent outcome from the first really intelligent outcome. TV debates were unmediated by journalistic intervention. But the journalistic class failed to get outside the Westminster bubble. Electoral calculus tool massively improved on the old swingometer tool. All the parties have gained something from this election.
James Crabtree (Prospect): There is a fundamental distinction between technologies you can see and technologies you can’t. The former was disappointing, the latter we don’t know about. But they may have been more significant. Liberal Democrats had an Obama-type surge but could not take advantage of it. Two further examples of innovation, by MySociety: the straight choice election leaflet selection was a huge success and democracy club was a halfway success.
Stella Creasy (New Labour MP): Takes a very different view of the online campaign. Offline and online campaigning is the same. How can we have the conversations that we need? Blogging was one thing I didn’t do. It doesn’t seem very interactive. Labour relative poverty forced the party to be innovative. I have 3000 email addresses, which I use to tell people what is happening. I reckon I picked up 500 votes via Twitter. Viral videos are also very powerful. People don’t know how to be involved in politics, so that problem can now be solved. These technologies made a real difference.
Harry Cole (Tory blogger): National media were convinced this was going to be the digital election. Labour claimed that they were the party social media, but misunderstands the scale of the internet. They lost candidates to twitter. The anti-Ed Balls attack ad is highly localised and this is where things may be going.
Anthony Painter (Labour blogger): Can we hear the political campaign online? Is is amplified online? Is it driven online? All parties did various things well. Conservative Party did well on message delivery. Labour did well on engaging its activists. The Liberal Democrats shifted from a policy-based campaign to absorging the wave of support Nick Clegg gathered.
Mark Pack (Liberal Democrat Voice): Asking if this is the internet election is the wrong question. The internet was essential to people’s lives in the political arena. What people really mean is will the internet challenge hierarchy in the election. If the internet was turned off, all the party’s organisations would have collapsed.
Questions from the floor
[How did online fundraising work?]
Craig Elder: Half a million pounds was raised online, the average donations was £34. That is a large sum.
[Was turnout increase driven by closeness or new media?]
Harry Cole: Having twitter is like having additional spin doctors online. There might be a huge bun fight on twitter following the Leaders’ Debate, but it was the same lines.
Stella Creasy: Twitter has allowed us to detoxify who we are. It doesn’t have to be about spin, it can be grounded in local communities.
Mick Fealty: The Obama is a misleading thing. The President of the US Represents 250 million people. An MP is representing a few thousand. Labour ignored the internet, and spoke to people. That was what worked.
Stella Creasy: That misses the point slightly. It is the offline and online, so you can engage with either.
Sam Coates (Conservative Party): The impact of what Stella is talking about is minimal. Twitter generated a huge amount of heat. 0.26 per cent of people watching the Leaders’ Debate were tweeting about it. Email is important, we used it to keep in contact with people, must more frequently than Labour.
Mark Hanson (Labour Party): Something is happening in society. People want to find people like them and talk to people to like them. They certainly don’t want to be broadcast at or talked down to. That is why mainstream media is less successful. Really it is about talking to people. Labour had a third of the staff, but three times the doorstep contact than was previously the case
[Biggest horror story from the election?]
James Crabtree: Without doubt Peter Mandelson’s state of the race memo. They really could have learned from the Obama campaign.
Craig Elder: The big poster campaign will be seen by more people than see parodies. But they probably didn’t swing anyone’s vote. Everyone was thinking harder before hitting the return key.
Anthony Painter: All the parties had their disasters. This was one of the least spun elections of recent times. Opinion polls dominated the narrative.
Mick Fealty: The comparison with 1997 is that this election couldn’t be spun. You can’t spin twitter, it can’t be controlled – the cracks are visible.
James Crabtree: Twitter is not the anti-spin zone. It is just more transparent.
Mick Fealty: This was unspun election. It was an unspinnable election. What happened to the Liberal Democrats? They ultimately lost seats. So more was going on than bloggers and journalists could grasp.
Anthony Painter: To be clear, the election was less spun because of opinion polling.
[What role will the internet play in policy making?]
James Crabtree: This wouldn’t happen during an election campaign, but it is very difficult.
Anthony Painter: Party membership haven’t been involved in policy making for a long time. So this would be new if the internet fulfilled it.
Stella Creasy: Just to prove a point, I tweeted to ask whether people used twitter to get in touch with me, and sure enough they have all come back saying that they did. We organise policy discussion through social activism. These are complex issues and we need organising mechanisms to achieve this. The problem comes when parties forget why they need engagement.
Craig Elder: No. 10 petition site is like the tin ear of government. Silly petitions did well because the people weren’t being listened to. We hope to do better. In 2005, we opened up blog sites to get policy feedback and got people to vote on policy. That is the most open policy-making forum that has ever been used in the UK. We use the Google Moderator tool.
Harry Cole: The most successful policy online in terms on policy is the cider party.
[How important was the personalisation of politics? i.e. Change We See and I Love the NHS. This allowed people to segment themselves]
Harry Cole: Change We See was controlled – pictures I posted didn’t get up. They didn’t really break through the bubble. Mob Monday was probably the most effective.
James Crabtree: Personalisation is driven by databases. This is what is driving the changes. Leaflets were becoming more personalised. A different template every weak.
[How important was YouTube?]
Stella Creasy: Retweeting is central to producing successful videos. They needed to be short. Being funny is really good. Interesting stuff works.
Mick Fealty: Obama was hugely important to making YT successful in the US. Dean got into trouble with videos. None of our leaders approached Obama’s skill set or his content.
Harry Cole: YouTube was very useful for fundraising. A video could be used to introduce the candidate. And convergence is becoming more significant.
[We now are being joined by Joe Trippi and Mindy Finn]
Mindy Finn (US Conservative Campaign Manager): Whether this was the internet election also depends on how you define the question. Many of the things Obama did were not so different from what candidates did before. The difference was the number of people who got involved. Obama bought more TV ads and did more organising than anyone before. It was during the primary that the internet was the most important. 2008 was only the internet election because of what happened in 2007. Obama might not have even run. But if you look at the last 6 weeks of the campaign, then maybe they are similar.
Joe Trippi (former Howard Dean campaign manager): This is about the size of the network. The tools left people act as they want to. When the Dean campaign ended, the was 1.4 million blog. When Obama started there were 77 million. Dean used video and created Deanspace. In 2003, the impact of social media was unimaginable. The numbers for Obama are actually very small. There is pioneering going on in the UK, as there was in 2004. The network is just being seeded today. That is the start. Part of the problem this election was that everyone was running away from the main issue. Labour might be in the place where they want to be.
[How important is the tea party? Can it be transformative?]
Mindy Finn: The internet does have a transformational power. That is not an internet story. It is ideological. Will the internet continue to be a story? It is intricate.
[Who managed the election? / What happened during week after the election? / Why did the vote share not move very much?]
Mick Fealty: There are three kinds of people: digital natives, digital migrants and digital refugees. This last kind are the ones running the country. The fact that people ran away from the main issue de-energised the debate.
James Crabtree: People don’t really notice the news. But we had some very weird results this time. Underneath the national campaign, we have a much more fragmented electorate.
Anthony Painter: The electorate is very fragmented. How do you draw groups together with a coherent message? Politics hasn’t changed, but people haven’t yet. We need to learn how to work in a new political environment.
Mindy Finn: The internet can be a force to agitate. In the US, there are a lot of change elections. Maybe all elections will be like this.
Joe Trippi: Disappointment is will come from politicians or parties. People will move to organisations like the Tea Party. But this is not just a political change, but across society. The top is losing power. “Armies of Davids” will form to change institutions.
Mindy Finn: Don’t discuss how the parties use the internet. It’s about how the people use the internet.
[Politics changed because of the electoral map. How transformative is it?]
Craig Elder: It can be transformative. The Liberal Democrats will get better at using surges when they occur. The tools might be useful for this.
