Sunny Hundal is a social media player. He’s intelligent, energetic, innovative and very passionate about fighting for what he believes. In the old days he might have been a fiery Labour councillor or the editor of a subversive magazine but in the modern era he’s using social media to marry together grass-roots support with key opinion formers to get the mainstream to take notice of the causes he is fighting for. He is currently campaigning against government plans to extent pre-charge detention past 28 days.

In addition to raising awareness of this issue on the blog and using tools like Facebook (nearly 5000 people joined their group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8018032131), in Saturday’s Guardian there was a letter signed by 35 important names saying that the government has failed to make the case for extending this period and it should withdraw its plans.

There was also a story about the letter in the newspaper.

This is a great example of how social media is replacing the gaps that are appearing where trade unions or freethinking backbench MPs used to be. They haven’t disappeared but they are less in number and the media are looking for alternative sources of grassroots opinion. Who would’ve thought that Tim Montgomerie of Tory blog ConservativeHome would be used as a spokesperson for ordinary Tory members on the Today programme, Newsnight or last night’s BBC News? 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under General PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.