Is Labour moving online?

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

UPDATE: Even Conservatives are beginning to compliment Labour on some of our online initiatives. Tory Bear says “the Tories really need to up their game and get involved” in the type of bloggers’ briefings mentioned below, while Tory Politico says this is one way in which “the Labour Party have out manoeuvred their Conservative counterparts”.

Last week, the New Statesman reported a study by the group Social Media Affairs which said that Labour remains behind the right in terms of online presence and activity. Certainly, the report has been good publicity for the group that commissioned it, but you’d expect that from a PR firm, wouldn’t you? And in biting hungrily at the bait in front of them, Labour bloggers have been goaded into offering the infant firm some handy free advertising.

Tom Miller says yes, the Tories get more traffic, but the Spice Girls sold a lot of records and the Sun sells a lot of newspapers. Doesn’t mean anything.

Lucy Powell pointed to the party’s online phonebank – as well as the power of social networking that she’s seen at first hand in her own campaign in Manchester Withington – as evidence of a culture change in Labour circles.

Meanwhile, the vastly experienced Stuart Bruce has labelled the data behind the report “worthless”.

Clearly, Labour has come on a long way in the last six months or so. As well as our trailblazing older bloggers, we now have Go Fourth, Alastair Campbell’s blog, the excellent Blackburn Labour site, the innovative LabourSpace and I’m told a vastly improved interactive social networking area on the Labour Party‘s official website on its way. It’s also reassuring to know that the Party is hosting briefings for bloggers.

But there’s no point in denying that if politics is about communicating a message and getting heard, then our traffic and our scope of influence still have to improve. Politics is fundamentally a game of communication, a game of popularity as well as principle – and we on the Left still have a lot to learn from successful independent bloggers within the opposition party, such as Iain Dale and ConservativeHome.

Until we have that reach, until we have that wider audience in an arena that is incresingly the place where people live their lives, then I’m afraid our hard work and undeniable improvement will continue to fall on deafer ears.

And we’ll have to compound our smaller successes together, because as Britain’s most powerful and popular political blogger, Guido Fawkes, says:

“Overnight success takes years”.