FT: If UK election were judged on web search activity alone, David Cameron would be Britain’s next prime minister: http://bit.ly/bNZJOS?

All the main parties are putting time into Twitter in the run-up to the  election with the Conservatives saying it’s  taking up  a fifth of the capacity of their digital campaign team. If the significance of a new medium is measured by the number of political gaffes it transmits then Twitter can lay claim to having arrived following David Cameron’s outburst on Absolute Radio last summer, last month’s ‘scumgate’ episode involving Labour MP David Wright and the hacking of the Twitter accounts of politicians including Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

Twitter is very much centred on personalities and when BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson declared earlier this month that the service had helped turn Sarah Brown into one of the most influential figures in British politics via a  following of more than 1.1 million for the Prime Minister’s wife  it underlined how disruptive micro-blogging might be.

But Twitter is only one of a number of social networks  being used in campaigning. There’s a colourful patchwork of online media including blogs, spoof sites, YouTube, Facebook and the parties’ own social networking sites. So I asked Alberto Nardelli, one of the co-founders of the political monitoring service Tweetminster, for his assessment of the role Twitter will play:

@albertonardelli: People and not social media will win the election, yet tools like Twitter can play a key role in mobilising, engaging and communicating with people. I think that Twitter will play a significant role in the election alongside other “new elements”, such as the TV debates, Facebook, YouTube etc. Specifically, I believe Twitter will play an interesting role in terms of its impact on the news agenda, party morale and in terms of framing topics – the perception that people have of key issues.

@markjones: What differences do you see between the parties in the way they are using Twitter?

@albertonardelli: As candidates are using Twitter differently it’s hard to define use by party – some candidates only broadcast, others engage, many use it to liaise with the media and as a platform for rebuttal. In general terms though, the Conservatives tend to be more effective in distributing the party line cohesively with activity driven mainly by CCHQ staff and its lines (NB: this doesn’t necessarily mean that such an approach is orchestrated), while Labour tends to be more “passionate” at a grassroots level with Twitter activity led by its candidates. The Liberal Democrats are somewhere between the two approaches. All three parties are fairly active in criticising each other.

The general election will not be decided by social media. And that’s official. Sort of.

At the Social Media World Forum at Olympia yesterday, Kerry McCarthy MP (Labour’s ‘Twitter tsar’) and Craig Elder (the Conservatives’ Head of Online Communities) debated the impact of social media on British politics.

These two are leading lights in social media circles, at least political ones,  and you might have expected to hear them evangelising about the significance of things like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for the coming election.

But in fact they played down their iikely impact.

I asked them to describe how the parties’ approaches to social media differ, what elements were most important, and what impact they would have on the election result. The responses to the latter struck me as notably downbeat.

With one eye on what happened in the U.S. Presidential election  in 2008, and another on the increasing use of the Web in almost every area of British life since the last general election in 2005, the presumption is that the Internet will play a much bigger role this time. But how much bigger?

Some observers are already playing down the likelihood of a seismic shift along the lines of that achieved by Barack Obama. eDemocracy points out the limited the size of the electorate open to any influence, let along that of social media. Meanwhile, Micah L Sifry of techpresident points out how Britain lacks some of the key ingredients that made it possible to build up the use of new techniques in the U.S. — greater freedom in fund-raising, a long campaign, and competition for leadership within political parties.

Nevertheless, all three main British parties have studied what Obama did and all three are busy experimenting with new approaches. Before looking at what they are up to, a reminder of what Obama did. There’s an excellent Edelman presentation on Obama’s social media strategy which neatly sums up the scale of his operation and how it integrated online and offline aspects of campaigning:

Just as in the States, there will be two very different battles being fought in the British campaign — the ‘air war’ of national media campaigns aimed at generating the maximum publicity and the ‘ground war’ of getting the vote out at local level. The ‘air war’ is still largely being fought using central staff at HQ and traditional ‘top-down’ broadcast techniques. It’s in the ‘ground war’, the less glamorous and less visible side of the election, where insiders say the real innovations are being tested.

Digital staffing

At a very basic level you can get an idea of what the parties are putting into this by the size of their staffing at HQ. The Conservatives have eight in their digital campaign team with a ninth soon to arrive, Labour has five and the Liberal Democrats have three full-time and four others with split responsibilities. In comparison, Obama is thought to have had 150 working on his operation by the end.

However, some of the most powerful elements of digital campaigning are, by their very nature, decentralised: measuring their effectiveness by the size of central staffing may be missing the point.

There are at least two new factors in the coming election — the first-ever televised prime ministerial debates and the first full-on deployment of social media during a British election (Facebook was a year old, YouTube had just started and Twitter didn’t even exist back in 2005).

In a City University panel discussion on the ‘new media election’ on Tuesday, host Evan Davies of BBC’s Today programme framed the debate in terms of which would be most influential:  The old, controlled media in the form of the three 90 minute TV debates to be broadcast by Sky, ITN and the BBC? Or the new, uncontrolled variety in the form of anyone with access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al?

The agreed guidelines on the TV debates were published shortly before the event. Amongst other things, they forbid heckling, and applause is only permitted at the start and end. The contrast with the ‘anything goes’ spirit of social media couldn’t be sharper.

So is it possible to predict which will be the most influential?

Matthew McGregor of Blue State Digital,  the company that ran Obama’s IT, believes that the way social media is used in “activating the activists” will be the untold story of this election. He made the case for email (the original social media?) being considered as the most important part of campaigning –  1 in 5 Obama voters were on an email distribution list that helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars. UK parties should take note ad invest 90 per cent of their election funding on email, he suggested.

McGregor also thought that “the way in which the TV debates are reported will be shaped online” given that viewers will be able to log their responses using social media far faster than any opinion poll can be undertaken. This linkage between social media and mainstream journalists was, he thought, illustrated neatly by the way in which Obama’s White House spokesman has finally got onto Twitter after accepting that journalists weren’t reading his media releases.

DJ Collins of Google suggested that the camera-phone — seemingly purpose-built to capture politicians’ gaffes — would prove the social media star of this election. He reminded the audience of how informal footage of allegedly racist comments by Senator George Allen had ended his bid for the Presidency back in 2006.

Billboard political advertising is a mainstay of election campaigns the world over. A generation ago, the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster was credited by Conservative party Treasurer Lord Thorneycroft with winning the 1979 election for Margaret Thatcher. But might the advent of social media mean that its days are now numbered?

Alastair Campbell, Labour’s director of election communications at the last election, thinks political advertising is losing its effectiveness:

“…public resistance to heavy messaging has grown, and for politics in particular there is no guarantee that the rewards of a well-funded, well-crafted and well-executed ad concept will outweigh the risks. The internet and, in particular, social networking have changed the terms of the relationship between the parties, the media and the public, taking at least some of the power to influence away from parties and media, to the benefit of the public.”

Rising doubts over the power of political advertising have been underscored by the emergence in recent weeks of sites and social network groups aiming to channel the wit of party supporters to disrupt the expensively created messaging of centralised political campaigns.

First came mydavidcameron.com, set up in the wake of a high-profile poster launch featuring what some critics thought was an airbrushed photograph of the Conservative party leader.  Visitors were invited to add their own captions.

The Conservatives’ second campaign, which targeted voters who hadn’t previously voted for the party, switched focus from the party leader to ordinary people and reasons why they might consider changing allegiance. But it  was swiftly parodied on ivenevervotedtory.com. This time there was a counter-attack in the form of a blog from the Conservative Home website — mylabourposter — shifting the focus onto Labour.