Blue State Digital (BSD), one of the key firms behind Barack Obama’s campaign, is certainly an impressive outfit which gets the internet. But that makes all the more surprising the piece published today on The Guardian website by Seth Reznik about British politics and uses of the internet.
Let’s take a few quotes:
Ken Livingstone, despite his disappointing loss, was one who learnt those lessons. Working with BSD, his campaign set out a range of ways in which barriers to involvement could be torn down. Instead of hiding activist events behind password-protected firewalls, any Londoner could find information about ways to join in, with nothing more than their postcode.
Err … the idea that the public should be able to go to a Mayor candidate website and find out how to join in dates back to 2000 and the first London Mayor elections, when the website for Susan Kramer (the Lib Dem candidate) did just that, as I’m sure did others. (Hey, Susan’s site back in 2000 had localised information, credit card donations, email lists and even a blog – written by a cat.)
Likewise, the idea that any member of the public should be able to put a postcode in on a site and find out things they can do dates back many years, across all parties in the UK.
Perhaps more importantly, it seems to me that Ken Livingstone, far from learning the lessons of Obama & co, precisely failed to learn a key part of them. Because faced with a welter of allegations against his record, he repeatedly and notably failed to engage with the details of them, instead usually going for broad knocking rhetoric. Contrast that with Obama and, for example, his lengthy, detailed and highly eloquent speech about race. Obama took on the arguments of his critics in detail; Livingstone didn’t.
Easy to read and timely emails allowing for individual supporters to take action were the foundation for this engagement.
I can now (just!) literally say people, including me, have been doing that for over a decade in the UK. No doubt about it, Obama’s campaign did their emails very well, but again this is hardly earth-shattering novelty.
It will be even more interesting to see how the technology can be used as a means of holding London’s new mayor to account, not just through blogs or websites but in generating mass action through email, for example in Progressive London’s campaign against Transport for London price rises.
Certainly will be, but you know – emails and websites have been used to try to hold the London Mayor to account and to campaign on issues they are responsible for since the very first day of us having a London Mayor. It will be interesting to see how this continues to evolve, but it seems to me any sensible discussion on this should be based on what has or hasn’t been done in the past rather than writing as if we’re now at year zero and don’t know anything that Americans haven’t come and told us.
ConservativeHome and WebCameron are seen as tough hurdles to beat.
ConservativeHome yes, but WebCameron? Even amongst internet-savvy Conservative activists I speak to, WebCameron is frequenlty seen as largely a damp squib that hasn’t come even close to meeting the original hype and ambitions for it, with the supply of new content having been heavily scaled back.
As I said at the start, I’ve no doubt that Blue State Digital know their business, but you know, internet campaigning has been going on outside the US for quite a few years now.
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5 Comments
If ConHome is such a tough hurdle to beat, how come Liberal Conspiracy has been doing so regularly for several months now, despite being a pretty new site? If WebCameron is such a success, how come my 5-year-old stepdaughter’s YouTube channel is significantly more successful than it?
I think Seth is making a fundamental error—when he thinks of the UK, he thinks of the Labour Government. We, of course, know better.
Of course, he knows there’s no point in talking to us. We haven’t got the budget for his services, and if we did, we’d use it much more effectively by paying for more regionalised and local sites in the proper Lib Dem way.
Plus, honestly? I never did like the look of the official Obama sites, they may be technically excellent but there was always something about them that didn’t strike me as being very good. Same applied to Ken’s site. That both were done by the same company was before now unknown to me.
What I see here is a company taking full credit for a force of nature. A surfer claiming to have invented the wave.
And Seth’s softly-softly endorsement of Draper’s venture undermines his credibility even more than his cock-eyed view of campaigning history; Draper’s conduct so far has been no better than that of your average freeper or Swift-Boater.
There’s a current thread at LabourList where Draper has challenged me to respond… and then held my response back. For over 17 hours now.
Moderation is not meant to be used by the host to gain an unfair advantage in a debate, but Draper has been at it since the very beginning and shows no signs of stopping or even caring.
Ok. I’ll dive in too.
Not especially impressed 😉 Shades of teaching Brits how to make cups of tea, and I don’t think he knows his British ground.
Agree on Webcameron – innovative for politicians here, but probably not the best that could be done. But worth it for the spoof “would you like to sleep with my wife” episode from Siobhan Simon.
The first “elected official” political videoblog done professionally I know about done was probably John Tobin of Boston (US) Council made by Steve Garfield starting in spring 2005 (I think) – he used to go to Boston (US) Council meetings with him.
>openness is the key to success and it can’t be faked.
Mr Reznik is right on that.
Bully to him for making a living from it though – we’re all still working on that.
WebCameron was a joke and an outright fraud in places. My evidence of that is still live. Here’s Dave Cameron ‘ad-libbing’:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3eZjS-ft7E
As WebCameron arrived, someone with similar self-promotion skills to Seth’s made himself out to be a notable brain from Google, but he turned out to be a copy monkey from the AdWords stable:
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2006/10/sam_roake.asp
Expanding on Matt’s comments, I’m pretty sure that this was a first, but if anybody knows of any online video submissions to government consultations that pre-date mine, please speak up:
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2008/01/my_socpa_submission.asp
I’ll agree with this. To a certain extent they think we’re totally clueless here.
To another extent, we’re ignoring the big elephant in the room – how much people hated Bush and that there is more of a culture in the US in local organising and community involvement.
What the BSD people did was harness well the information and enthusiasm already out there. They have no clues on how to generate that enthusiasm.
Furthermore, we don’t have a system here where everyone votes for one candidate, and we have much stronger data protection laws. That makes the environment very different….