The return to work on Monday prompted the launch of the main UK political parties’ pre-election campaigns and the indications are that social media is likely to play a big role in the run-up to the general election.

David Cameron kicked off the Conservatives’ Draft Health Manifesto with a very neat ‘ask Cameron’ feature making use of Google Moderator — something I’d not heard of before but previously used by Conservative MP Giles Chichester in the runup to the Copenhagen climate summit.

Meanwhile Labour took a different angle and used some interesting  techniques to ensure that their take on the Conservatives’ fiscal ‘black hole’ figured prominently on search engine results. They also made the full document (which runs to 150 pages) available to all-comers via Google Documents — previously this kind of work has tended to end up only with a handful of journalists and experts.

The backdrop to all of this is of course the widely held assumption that deft use of social media is what helped Barack Obama to gain the US Presidency in 2008. There’s rather a good book by Jeff Jarvis looking at how organisations should reinvent themselves in the age of social media. It’s called ‘What Would Google Do?’ My betting is that the strategists at the parties’ HQs can’t help asking themselves, ‘what would Obama do?”