The social media election?

After last week's election results it seems that @nick_clegg may not have as much in common with @BarackObama as some of his supporters had hoped.

More on this later, but for now don't worry... I'm not planning to get political. I have read enough political commentary over the last few weeks and I don't feel the need to add to it.

Actually, I am interested in the role of social media in the campaign... in particular whether we have seen the first "social media election" as The Guardian and others predicted or whether Gordon McIntyre-Kemp has it right in his post The Next Election will be Socialised.

Twitter and Facebook have certainly been buzzing with debate and grassroots campaigns. Social media has been the story (Kerry McCarthy's ill-considered tweet about postal votes) or given it viral reach (such as Philippa Stroud's prayer sessions to 'cure' gay people).

There are some politicians who are established social media users like @tom_watson and (looking a bit closer to home) @leahfraser who kept on Tweeting through the campaign and after the count was announced.

However, most of this buzz is what I think of as "horizontal" social media (and yes, I know that could be misinterpreted!). What I mean by this is people talking about the election (debating, re-Tweeting media stories and blog posts) - rather than interacting directly with policy makers, candidates or party leaders (which I would label as "vertical" interaction).

When you start to look beyond the horizontal, the picture is quite different.

If you watched the election campaign unfold on Twitter you might have noticed the similarity I mentioned earlier between Nick Clegg and Barack Obama. Both of their Twitter accounts are "managed" (in Clegg's case) or "run" (in Obama's) by somebody else on their behalf.

Both accounts are genuine (Obama's is even a verified account) and totally transparent about the third party involvement (if you really want to outsource your tweets then you could learn a lot from their approach).

When you start to look at "vertical" social media activity from these accounts (and from @uklabour and @conservatives) it is pretty much a one way street.

In other words, the parties and many politicians treated social media as a broadcast medium. They realised that social media was an important channel to communicate with the electorate, but used it at a fairly rudimentary level.

We saw David Cameron on Mumsnet of course, but the leaders debates themselves were firmly TV based. Twitter Q&A sessions were few and far between. 

If David Cameron does agree a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (at the time of writing he had been invited to form a government, but the coalition deal wasn't signed) then the accouncement isn't likely to come via a Tweet from Nick Clegg.

In fact, the best use of social media from someone close to a party leader was probably @SarahBrown10, who uses Twitter in a much more "social" way and has picked up over a million followers (a hell of a lot more than any of the official Twitter accounts). 

This revolution, at least, was not Twittervised.

I'm not arguing that politicians should be tweeting from the campaign trail every five minutes and I don't think it is realistic to expect Nick Clegg to be live-blogging his ongoing discussions with the other parties.

However, I do believe this may be the last election where this relatively shallow involvement in social media will work for politicians (or maybe the second last, but I'm assuming for now that the next general election is in five years or so).

Twitter didn't even exist during the 2005 general election campaign, and Facebook still wasn't accessible to the general public. You can't call either of these "emerging technologies" any more, but I wouldn't like to even try to predict the reach of social media by 2015 (and what it will look like).

If the graph continues in anything like its current form, then expect to see social media to play a much more important role in 2015 (or thereabouts)... in a real "social media election".

Politicians won't have the option of hopping on the social bandwagon once Parliament is dissolved. There will be a divide between those who have built up their social networks and developed relationships with online constituents over the long term and those who still see social media as just another campaign tool.

My message to the candidates who ventured into social media for this election campaign? Don't stop now... if you carry on engaging, building up relationships and showing a little of what you really stand for it will stand you in good stead next time around.

If your Tweets stop once the returning officer announces the results, then don't expect to have much social media credibility in five years' time.