WebCameron.. well it’s… different
Written by the founding editor on 30th September 2006 – 12:12 pm
Via Paul Walter comes news of the arrival of WebCameron. Initially like a party political broadcast - but with the twist no-one thought of before… add a screaming kid in to the mix.
It’s all very Conservative Party meets “web 2.0″ - embedded video, gradient graphics… and not a hint of blue or a tree in sight. This is, we are to believe, David’s “personal” blog.
It’s also at the moment very broken, and taking an age to load.
Whether it is a success or not, only time will tell. But clearly the Conservatives have the overdraft facility to throw at this stuff.
There’s more information here.
What do you think of it?
UPDATE: WebCameron is one of several projects being delivered for the Conservatives by Head, London who also produced the websites for four of the six Tory policy commissions.
Posted in e-campaigning
30th September 2006 at 12:59 pm
Interesting to see that it’s totally video-led - using handheld cameras. The smart thing about video is that it’s very time efficient for the politician and undeniably ‘personal’. They appear to be using their own flash video hosting facilities (which we tend only to when Google Video has picked a singularly bizarre frame to associate with one of our videos).
30th September 2006 at 1:04 pm
It has the potential to very effective, but it depends entirely on the content. If they use it to promote new policies, it will be much more beneficial for them than if, over an extended period of time, it shows very little substance.
The first two videos I looked at both seemed to be “Welcome to the site”, with Cameron saying some of the same stuff - don’t know why they used both.
30th September 2006 at 2:19 pm
[...] As, indeed, must the Liberal Democrats. It may be cynical, still in beta (and isn’t the perpetual beta the sign of web 2.0?), and it may not, ultimately, get a huge audience, but is that relevent? Does it matter how many people do access the site as long as as many people as possible know that they can access the site? [...]
30th September 2006 at 3:02 pm
All I got was:
“Sorry for the inconvenience but due to high volumes of traffic, WebCameron (BETA)
is currently unavailable.”
Nigel Ashton.
30th September 2006 at 4:24 pm
The one thing that might make prove to be a mistake is hosting the video themselves rather than ‘going to where the eyeballs are’ and hosting on YouTube or Google Video. The other thing that does it remove the headache of having to find your own bandwidth to host the video - as they appear to be finding!
30th September 2006 at 4:44 pm
I also didn’t see anything which lets Tory members embed the video in their own sites to get greater coverage.
30th September 2006 at 6:28 pm
Yes actually, it does make you wonder, given that YouTube works so well, why did they re-invent the wheel?
30th September 2006 at 6:28 pm
And if he keeps filming them in the house I think Mrs Cameron will soon grow tired of that
30th September 2006 at 7:46 pm
Whoo knows, if he keeps recording them in the house he may end posting something rather more “adult” in nature……
30th September 2006 at 10:12 pm
Interesting to see that Head used Wordpress for the Conservative policy consultation sites… (like us). If anything, our policy consultation sites appear to be slightly ahead on the comment front despite being around for a shorter period of time. Not sure why this should be the case…
Not sure either is ideal though. TakingPower, which has been less constrained (using video, surveys, polls, daily debates etc.) appears to have had more activity than all eleven ‘official’ sites (both Tory and Lib Dem) added together.
30th September 2006 at 10:18 pm
Actually, those 4 Wordpress sites have only been around for a few days - it looks like someone in CCHQ decided that the consultations that didn’t have sites already should be given them.
Is TakingPower perhaps benefitting from being “cross party”?
1st October 2006 at 12:14 pm
I think it might be.
But there have been several other things we’ve done on top.
The primary thing is that we’ve designed it for the web from the very beginning. And the policy consultations are designed to put an essentially paper and meetings based process onto the web in relatively unchanged form.
1st October 2006 at 12:41 pm
Grace - with a young baby in the house, I doubt there’s much of an “adult” nature going on
1st October 2006 at 8:49 pm
Are we allowed to make comments here about the content of the videos, as well as just about the software used to produce them?
I thought they were interesting. The screaming baby does sound quite persistent, but in fact when he breaks off to talk to his child, he does actually come across as quite natural and normal. This makes it all the more jarring when he stops talking to them with “where was I? oh yes” and then goes straight back into full-politician mode, complete with lots of emphatic hand gestures as if he were on a platform somewhere.
I read in the press that they were intended to appeal to younger people and those who are not that politically engaged. I’m not sure he succeeds with this: his appeal that MPs should not decide their own salaries is easily comprehensible to anyone, I guess, but before long he is talking about the value of the constituency link, and other relatively obscure constitutional points that might be of interest to politicos but for a normal person not versed in the arguments for and against PR is surely relatively technical. Whatever it is that’s going to decide how people on estates round here vote at the next General Election, it’s not a demand for a cut in the number of special advisers.
And the contrived casualness does look a bit silly - I mean can’t he just tell us what he thinks, without having to do it while he’s loading the dishwasher?
But having said all this I do think video casting of this kind (or whatever it’s called - I’m sure someone’ll correct me in a minute
) is a good way of politicians telling their story themselves and helping us to get to know them better. Cameron’s problem is just that it helps us to realise that he’s a bit of a pillock really.
1st October 2006 at 10:11 pm
The watch-out for any politician is that, post-lonelygirl15, a big chunk of any potential ‘young’ online audience is going to be ultra-suspicious of any fakery.
That said, completely agree that video is a great tool to put across your candidate in an unintermediated way. The challenge, as ever, with any internet method of campaigning, is to get people to see it.
Currently, all the significant impact seems to have been when people have made a PR story out of it (as we did with our videos during conference), and irrespective of the quality of the video, in these terms, the Cameron videos are probably going to be seen as a success.
In terms of the content of Cameron’s video, all I can remember a few hours later is David Cameron doing the washing-up… er that’s it. Enough to make people vote for him? Not convinced.
2nd October 2006 at 9:20 am
I love Stephen Tall’s take on WebCameron
http://tinyurl.com/javjx
Nigel.