From LabourList
Photos by bitospud on Flickr, here.
Saturday’s Progress conference ‘Labour 2.0: campaigning for the net generation’ was a big success. With distinguished leaders in the field speaking and sharing ideas, including Joe Rospars, Greg Jackson, Sue Macmillan and Tory Trolll – as well as a productive debate between ConservativeHome‘s Tim Montgomerie and LabourList editor Derek Draper – many attendees left with a new sense of vigour and enthusiasm for what Labour people can do online.
The main theme of discussion was that Labour’s online presence needs to be more reflective of our grassroots activism, more open, and more innovative. Below are some of the highlights from the day’s discussions.
Opening Address – Douglas Alexander, Labour’s Election Coordinator
Douglas Alexander started the discussion, saying that new media is not a substitute for a message that resonates with the public – rather, it is a place to give new impetus to old ideas. He urged Labour supporters to continue to knock on doors, make phone calls and organise the events that would help spread the Labour message. But he also urged activists to get online and follow Barack Obama’s example of communicating community messages through regular email updates, because ‘new technology is lowering the barriers to entry.’ Douglas’ remaks can be read in full here.
Keynote Address – Joe Rospars, Blue State Digital
Obama’s new media director echoed Douglas’ message, saying new media must support and reflect the ground operation of the traditional campaign. He provided one of the day’s early highlights with this remarkable video about the ordinary people who led the Obama campaign on the ground.
He said afterwards: ‘what we saw in that video was not people sitting at computers and talking about politics on the internet – it was people out in the communities, knocking on doors and making phone calls and doing concrete things. 13 millions supporters gathered online and communicated through a relationship, through events organised online to bring people together – but to achieve offline things – house parties, door-knocking. Our targeted emails meant people knew when there were events in their communties in which people could hit the streets. Of 200,000 offline events, about our staff coordinated with about 5% of them. That means 95% were not organised by us – though we could track what they were doing, and they could arrange them, through our online tools’.
What will the future of internet campaigning look like?
The first session was chaired by Luke Pollard, Labour PPC for South West Devon, who led the discussion between Tangent‘s Greg Jackson and Andrew Chadwick, Director of New Political Communication Unit at the University of London. Ben Brandzel, Director of MoveOn arrived late and flustered. Andrew stressed the importance of allowing our online presence to reflect our values, but also of loosening up and relinquishing control to the community online. Greg Jackson said that Labour’s web strategy needs to reflect that people now live and breathe on the internet, so it needs to be innovative, snappy and quick to react.
Mobilising the centre-left blogging community
Tory Troll‘s Adam Bienkov remarked that the right-wing bloggers may have been more widely read over the years, but that this doesn’t mean that their work is better. The session quickly morphed into a discussion on why women are not blogging in the same numbers as men. Tom Barry from BorisWatch said that there can be a lot of aggression and nastiness in the blogosphere, which can put women off contributing regularly. At the end of the session, Chair Alex Smith called for women volunteers to record a spot to camera on how we can tip this imbalance. The video will feature on LabourList next Monday, as we celebrate International Women’s Day.
Fundraising and voter ID online
Stella Creasy gets the internet like no other politician. She knows it’s a platform for sharing stories and communicating, and although she says she’s not very technical, her campaign in East London is clearly at the cutting edge. She stresses that the most important thing about working online is email. By sending an email to Walthamstow constituents once a week, Stella has developed an authentic online dialogue, to direct people to and engage people in community events and to answser their questions quickly.
‘That relationship is not possible offline’, she said. ‘We can’t get 2,000 leaflets delivered each week, but we can do that with email. In the emails, I ask “please share this with other people”, and that helps you build a relationship.’ She also says it’s important to focus on single issues in campaigning. ‘200 people signed up this week alone because of a local issue – the closure of a local cinema – that people really care about. With these emails, we have to communicate the difference that Labour makes otherwise it’s just self aggrandizing.’
‘We send a Working for Walthamstow email to 2,000 people a week. It’s about what’s happening in the community – local Sure Start initiaitives, local jazz clubs – real community events. That email every week shows Labour’s activity in the community and how we are part of the local fabric. Importantly, most of the content is generated not by me, but by local party groups.’
Stella also stressed how important it is to continue with this relationship outside of election times, so that people know where the Party is coming from when there is an election.
The other panelists, Jag Singh and Gavin Shuker, were equally insightful and helped the conference to really gain focus.
Learning from the private sector
Simon also directs us to a great example of this idea, the ‘Coke and Mentos craze’. Mentos embraced the craze and developed a new relationship with the public as a result, by Coke disassociated themselves from it and were criticised. He also points to the Open Source success of the internet campaign to bring back the Cadbury Whispa.
One of the most eagerly awaited speakers of the afternoon is Oliver Rickman from Google, who says that Labour – like Google – need to capture the feeling of the party and its volunteers. ‘Big won’t beat small anymore – fast will beat slow’. He says Labour can replicate Google – who have chucked out the idea of a business plan. ‘We launch early and we launch often. We gather feedback to then make our relationships and our systems better. We have a scheme called 20% Time – people who work at Google have the right to work on new exciting, wacky initiatives, and this empowers everyone in the organisation to think creatively. Google News started this way. So we need to think about making structures that are free enough to allow this in the Labour Party’.
The session is one of the day’s best.
Transforming Labour’s campaigns and communications through new media
Nonetheless, Nick’s thesis had some useful indicators: ‘Information is harder to control now, so it’s more difficult as a party to reach voters. This means traditional campaigning – ‘shoe leather’ – will become even more important. Our communications must now be a dialogue. One way communication is no longer acceptable’. It never was, Nick.
Case in point is the recent BSD-powered campaign, Hope not Hate. After the BNP announced they’d march through Liverpool, BSD ‘had an email directly tailored to our list within an hour. We asked all our members to sign a petition, and to spread the message to their friends. Hope not Hate contacted tens of thousands of people, and partly as a result of their petition, the BNP cancelled their march. ‘Within an hour of that, we had another email to our supporters letting them know they’d won. We were talking to them in a personal way’.
Paul Simpson argued that the term new media is a misconception, because it’s not new and it’s not really media: ‘instead, it’s about what we do as individuals all the time, day in, day out’. Paul also announced that the Labour 2.0 Twitter HashTag had become the 2nd most popular HashTag in the UK for Saturday.
Sue finished the discussion saying ‘we need to use email addresses to mobilise people to get to work on the ground; not just be social networkers for its own sake, but be proactive, and get others to invite people to do the same. Facebook events must be brought into MembersNet. There must be a greater degree of openness for our non-members – we need to encourage more volunteering and open up our events to non-members. Our general election campaign is not about getting one candidate elected, but about giving our 650-odd candidates the full support they need, the tools and the strategy to do these things for themselves. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about doing things to get the most out of new media, as a way of contacting people on a one to one basis and reflecting our grassroots acitivism’.
More on the Labour 2.0 conference:
“It was a fantastic day with lots of good ideas and with over 100 activists turning up” – Jessica Asato, The Progressive
“Labour will push ahead with developing a number of new ideas for communicating over the internet following this weekend’s new media conference” – David Singleton, PR Week
“It was a really great day and bought together all strains of practitioners, campaigners, bloggers and academics working in this area and supportive of progressive political aims” – Nick Anstead, NickAnstead.com
“Despite some teething problems, LabourList isn’t all that bad. It is beginning to include a diverse mix of articles. If DD can cut out the student politics he might turn LabourList into something significant” – Tim Montgomerie, ConservativeHome
“I couldn’t help but feel optimistic about Labour’s online future” – Luke Cholerton-Bozier, The Progressive
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