Social Media and the UK Election

a superficial rebuttal to a superficial Economist article

What was the impact of new media on the UK election?  We are not totally sure, and since we weren’t in the UK during the election or following it like a good voter should, we are not going to answer that here.  However as new media enthusiasts we want to add our post/tweet/support to the UK post mortem.  And we are going to do it by picking apart a particular sloppy Economist article, trumpeting the triumph of old media.  A bit self congratulatory?  Yes we believe so.

As the Economist points out, a record number of people watched the leader’s debate and it led to a ten point swing for Lib Dems, thus old media (in this case TV) wins.  No doubt the televised debate was powerful as measured both by the impact it had on the race and by the days of coverage that followed, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum.  People interacting and engaging through social media might have generated additional interest prior to the event and led to the high viewership.  (Although the novelty of the first leader’s debate probably would have had a strong audience on any medium)  Twitter and Facebook have also been shown to amplify the impact of an event, which might have exaggerated the Lib Dems swing.

Strangely the article also positions social media as a niche media noting that television has the ability to reach more people.  Sure everyone has a TV and not everyone has a Facebook account and even less have a Twitter handle.  But relegating social media as the trendy fad for the young and hip stopped being a viable news angle in 2008. The day of the election #Ukelection #election, GE2010 and other related hashtags were the trending topics on Twitter.  While ‘trending topics’ does not have great utility for marketers it is a genuine measure of interest.  If there are 50 million tweets per day, a trending topic usually means there are more than 5 million related tweets to that topic.  5 million tweets, multiple hash tags, multiple days…you get the idea.

Measuring Tweets | Twitter Trends

Not to mention some of the most popular stories on the web and in those old time newspapers were related to tweets and posts about the hung parliament.  Our personal favorite the 404 Government not Found spoof, it got picked up by the BBC, UK Guardian and was pretty much retweeted from every British person we follow.

TV and social media tools are fundamentally different mediums.  TV remains and will remain one of the best ways to blast out a message or a series of static images.  The power of social media is that it does what TV cannot.  It solicits a call to action.  It encourages debate and collaboration in real time, which was demonstrated throughout the election and on polling day when people reported voting, problems, and irregularities.

Voting Map

So there you go, our straw into the haystack pile of the ‘power of social media.’  Lots of other people are going to do much better analysis such as @jamescrabtree, @nextleft, @iaindale, but we just couldn’t let the Economist get away with this one.