Comparing the popularity of different words in the latest stories from the the Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Labour Party websites reveals striking differences in the messages being put out by each party online.

Reproduced below are three word clouds, where the bigger a word is the more often it appeared on that party’s latest website stories. The word clouds were generated yesterday (Thursday) based on the then state of each of the three websites.

First, let’s look at the Conservative Party:

(Click here or on graphic for larger version.)

No doubt about what is central to the Conservative Party’s message – David Cameron. William Hague gets a bit of a look in as does Europe in various forms. The armed forces feature too, but overall the message is pretty much “Vote Cameron”.

Labour by contrast have a very different pattern:

(Click here or on graphic for larger version.)

Whilst you are playing the game of “hunt for the reference to Gordon Brown”, you’ll come across several references to the Conservatives. But references to any Labour figures are distinctly minimal.

As for the Liberal Democrats, it’s a different pattern again:

(Click here or on graphic for larger version.)

The emphasis here is much more on the party and the team – hence the popularity of “Shadow” and “Minister” rather than simply Nick Clegg’s name. As with the Conservatives, but unlike Labour, words related to issues don’t feature that prominently.

All three of these are only snapshots of what the respective party websites were pushing as stories at one moment in time. However, in each case the pattern seems to reflect an underlying choice of messages that is also reflected in the wider behaviour of all three parties. In that respect, whatever you think of those choices, all three web teams look on message.