Category Archives: Online politics

Ever missed seeing a Liberal Democrat on Question Time, or a party political broadcast, or some other media appearance because you didn’t know about it in advance?

Courtesy of Flock Together, you can put those days behind you. It includes a service to advertise in advance major appearances in the media by Liberal Democrat MPs and other senior figures.

There are three different ways you can tap into this information: 

1. Using this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LiberalDemocratsMediaAppearances, or
2. By email: register at FlockTogether and pick “Media appearances” as one of the categories of

…

There’s been a noticeable burst of new Liberal Democrat bloggers in the last few weeks, possibly driven in part by the leadership contest, including David Boyle, Charlotte Gore, “Harold Muckle“, Alix Mortimer, Bernard Salmon and Andrew Tate.

So now seems a good time to remind Lib Dem bloggers about some of the tools and widgets the party has available – including the Liberal Democrat campaign buttons, the Lib Dem TV feed and an easy way to let people sign up as party supporters.

Details of them all are on the party website. You don’t need any …

If you use Google to search the Internet, then you can redirect some of the advertising revenue from Google’s ads into the party’s coffers (sorry, not your own!) if you use the Google search box in the party’s free Internet browser toolbar.*

Once you’ve got the toolbar, just stick your search queries into its search box rather than into a Google search box anywhere else, and – bingo! – money starts being paid to the party. (We don’t get to see what your searches are, by the way, we just get a cut of the total advertising revenue from all …

If your political party launches its first entirely online advertising campaign several years after another party first did the same, do you:

a. Claim you are first anyway and hope no-one notices?, or
b. Something else

If your answer is (a), congratulations – you work for the Conservative Party. And well done on finally catching up with what the Liberal Democrats have been doing with advertising for several years 🙂

(Insert outrage about PR, spin, fibs, dishonesty etc. to your taste here).

PS I wonder if the person who decided to claim they are first when they’re not is the same person who decided …

From this week’s Marketing Week:

Conservative frontbench MPs are being forced to distance themselves from rebel Tory backbenchers who have commissioned an online viral campaign that uses real mobile phone video footage of drunkenness and “happy slapping” in a bid to encourage young people to vote Conservative in the forthcoming General Election … Asa Bailey, founder of his eponymous firm, says: “Conservative backbench MPs commissioned the campaign, but I cannot identify them.”

Not a good start. But things get worse when you go to the YouTube channel that has been created. Scroll down to the Wales Tourist Board Special film, …

Joe Trippi says this is the funniest ad he remembers.

This could be an interesting development: Google has announced that their Google News front page is going to start accepting comments from people. However, it won’t be a comment free-for-all; rather the people allowed to comment will be the subjects of the news stories themselves.

The party’s email list server continues to go from strength to strength, with the year ending 31st July seeing the total number of emails sent through it break the four million total for the first time.

Any party member can register and start creating email lists (for party use!) for free, so if you’ve not yet started using it just visit lists.libdems.org.uk and start benefiting today.

There are many advantages of using it, such as the way the system automatically adds the relevant legal imprint to your messages and the online web archives – so it is easy to find …

The party’s extranet is a resource for party activists, elected representatives (including councillors) and staff and the home for artwork, campaign materials, policy briefings and also resources to accompany the party’s big national campaigns, such as the crime and health ones. It also features an online discussion forum.

Access is open to all party councillors, staff, approved Parliamentary candidates, local party Chairs, EARS officers and Membership Secretaries, trainers and up to eight other nominated people per local party. Full access details are on the site and if you’ve not yet registered, you can kick off the registration process …

Flock Together, the party’s website for finding and advertising meetings, social events, campaigning sessions and just about anything else, has now been linked in to the party’s Liberal Democrats Account system.

The LDA allows party members to create one username and password which then work across a range of different party sites – including the members only site, the manifesto consultation site, the online petition tool and now Flock Together too thanks to some nifty coding by Martin Tod.

So you now don’t have …

Take a look at this. I think that the best that can be said is that the information provided about each person is a little, shall we say, sparse?

And it says something interesting about the priorities in Labour HQ that this person has far more information given about them 🙂