Much excitement across the Tory blogosphere this morning over the launch of myconservatives.com. The launch hasn’t been a totally 100% slick affair, as this screen-grabs illustrates – and as Chris Keating has already blogged:
Much angst at the ConservativeHome comments thread on this where many people seem to be reporting you can’t get through to it and that it redirects straight to the Tory Party homepage. Not great publicity, really. Someone should have thought that one through.
Still, it’s nice to know that technical cock-ups can occur in even the best-funded parties.
Those LDV readers who occasionally stumble across Iain Dale’s blog (you know who you are) may have noticed this sentence in his promo piece for myconservatives.com:
The LibDems are big on using Twitter etc but aren’t moving forward in a serious way – it doesn’t help that they’ve lost two people (Rob Fenwick and Mark Pack) who genuinely knew and understood online campaigning to the private sector.
Indeed, Rob and Mark have been big losses (though Rob might be bemused to find his university employer is counted as the private sector).
However, pace Iain, the party is currently in the process of building its own social network – to be fully integrated with a new federal and members’ site – with a go-live schedule of a few weeks’ time.
I’ve just been speaking with Sam Lockwood (@samlockwood on Twitter), the party’s new Web and E-Communications Technology Manager at Lib Dem HQ, who is keen to involve Lib Dem bloggers in discussions very shortly. If you’re a Lib Dem blogger interested in being ‘in-the-loop’ drop me a line with your contact details at , and I’ll make sure Sam has your name.
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I don’t think we have anything to worry about as I have said in my blog post:
http://www.irfanahmed.org/2009/10/myconservatives-more-like.html
Why do we need a Lib Dems social networking site? Why can’t we get out and talk to each other face-to-face? Seems like another way to keep people sat in front of their computers rather than doing something positive.
I think things like this always appear to be contrived in UK politics because they are instigated by the top brass of the party. There is a little less suspicion of that in the USA, and besides, they have a lot more practice at genuine grassroots activism because of the federal and state dispersion of power throughout the country.
The only way it will work here is if it is started by and encouraged by people who don’t have the whiff of Westminster about them. Anything that has a connection to that is potentially at risk of being starved of oxygen at birth.
I was at a talk on social networking the other day, given by a guy from an online marketing agency as part of a conference on community engagement. He said nothing will ever replace knocking on people’s doors and asking them what they think.
Personally I think social networking sites are great – I’ve renewed my friendships with loads of Lib Dems I lost touch with when I dropped out of London politics, and I can see the power of having a strong Lib Dem presence on the likes of Facebook and Twitter and of course our blogging community (though that’s something I don’t have time to do).
I’m less convinced of the need for a specific site for Lib Dems, particularly if it means people spend more time talking to fellow Lib Dems to the detriment of potential voters both online and on the doorstep.
Dave,
The point of social networking is to help facilitate person-to-person interaction, not replace it. It worked for Obama, and to be honest, he used it solely as a means to organise his campaigners, who then went and did the useful stuff (knocking on doors).
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[...] next stage to be released will be a new social action network site called ACT (previewed here on Lib Dem Voice) which should be ready in a couple of weeks. It will be open to all Liberal Democrat supporters, [...]