Cracks appearing in the Tories’ cyber-strategy

Just as Labour gets its new media act in order, cracks start to appear in the Tories cyber-strategy. The team that brought you Cameron’s Washing Up: The Movie is apparently under pressure and out of favour with the ‘old money’ at Tory HQ.

The Tories web guru is Rishi Saha and he’s trying to do some good stuff but from what I hear he’s not got the backing from the people internally who can make things happen.

A lot of Rishi’s engagement strategy is long term in nature and requires actual engagement, as opposed to just collecting lists of supporters. They’ve tried to reach out to the blogosphere outside of politics and into broader online communities where they would hope to ‘change the atmosphere’ build the online equivalent of social groupings that meet regularly and affiliate to a political party offline.

It was a great idea to get the Brummie blogeratti along to the Party conference in Birmingham last Autumn but the feedback I got was there wasn’t a lot of follow-through in terms of giving the bloggers access to anyone in the Party or making them feel special.

There are cutbacks being made in the Tory external relations team and it’s likely that certain factions are fighting to keep budget in mainstream comms rather than new media.