In one sense I’m disappointed the election is over.

Returning from my own self imposed wilderness at the dismalness of the political scene to the local fold in New Forest East has been a revelation to me to see how social media networks can re energise the election process, and importantly how it has engaged more of our local membership helpers during campaigns – and not just the under 35s. The more active are definitely the silver surfers who have taken to the new technology like a duck to water. So much so, that a regular evening briefing session during the campaign was abandoned in favour of updates by Facebook.

It seems a long way from endlessly shoving leaflets through doors for our Liberal candidate in 1966 in Bracknell when I was 7 years of age – encouraged by my mother who idolised Jo Grimond. With just 12 MPs from 8.5% of the national vote in that election, we’ve thankfully moved a long way since.

As an aside, our high point in that constituency was organising a public meeting at a local school hall for David Owen after the Limehouse Declaration in January 1981 and the formation of the SDP. We expected 200. In the event 800 showed up. And that was when the print media was in its full pomp. Big circulations, big newsooms. Not the fragmented state of our media today.

Running a Facebook page and Twitter account for our candidate during this election – whilst he pressed the flesh on the doorstep – has certainly given me glimpse of how we can run an online campaign side by side with main stream media (MSM). Our candidates ‘feed’ was an eclectic mix of news, humour, retweets from the politicos plus the evangelical and prosaic from Cowley Street, cartoons, pictures and the occasional Youtube video. Very time consuming; great fun to do, but probably, at this election, with a quite a limited audience. It certainly seemed to help ‘develop’ a character for our candidate.

Too often during the campaign I was frustrated by the paucity of truly ‘local’ coverage. Our local ITV station has an area which extends from Southend to Weymouth and frankly its election coverage was dismal. The BBC had far too may other ‘interesting’ seats and battles to cover to pay much attention to ours.

Our local paper also covered some tight battles across the city of Southampton, so the question remains as to how we can engage and inform our truly local electorate. Both Romsey and Eastleigh abut our patch and on election night we had pride and pain in equal measure watching their results.
It suggests to me that to remain relevant to our local electorate we continue to use MSM and campaign literature through to (our) Council elections next year in order to drive the localised Twitterati and Facebookers to our pages and web site, which provide links to each other. Curiously ‘fans’ to our local pages continue to rise even after the result, so the informed feed will carry on albeit in a lower key. It’ll be curious to see whether an expection will build for us to defend difficult decisions as we are now part of a coalition Government.

I would certainly be interested in hearing of other experiences using social media and how local engagement can be increased.