Labour Makes Breakthrough In New Media Strategy
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 by Mark Hanson 
Much chatter in the Twitterverse/blogosphere in the last 24 hours about the Labour Party’s new widget - a fake online webchat between David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague about the economy.
We don’t engage in political tittle-tattle here, we’re all serious media folk :), but the reason I mention it is it’s significant how Labour is getting the fact that its web strategy needs to be about making themselves useful to their audiences where they are already congregating. The approach previously was all about dragging people to the official website and pushing propaganda at them.
This little widget is proving a hit on the blogs but more importantly its prompting liberal leaning (but possibly not Labour supporting) folk to discuss on Twitter - @daljit_bhurji kicked off a discussion yesterday - as well as the amount of people linking to it on their Facebook page. Community building on Facebook is an area I’m studying closely at the moment and its a much better environment for politicians to be useful (CAVEAT) if done right! I understand that Facebook was one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Labour’s site today.
These kinds of ideas emerge out of a process internally, largely involving politicians, Party staffers and the web agency, in this case Tangent Labs. However they need championing and a lot of credit should go to Labour’s new media supremo, Sue MacMillan and Tangent’s Greg Jackson.
Interesting that if you Google ‘Internet Campaigning’ a Guardian piece on this widget is number 2.
UPDATE its slipped to 6th!
