New media and the election: less than meets the eye?

This is supposed to be the election where the “new media” makes its mark – Twitter, Facebook, political blogging and YouTube, mobilising support, exchanging views and shaking up the staid old world of British politics.

As The Economist wrote stirringly: “There is talk of Britain being on the verge of its first truly digital election.” There may be talk, but how much action is there?

While there is no doubt that new outlets are being used to do something that has never been done before, a look at the statistics shows it’s important not to overstate their role.

First, let’s not forget that undoubtedly the single most talked about event of the election so far was the leaders’ debate which took place last night. There is nothing particularly “digital” or “new media” about television and a programme concept that has been around since 1960.

Early indications from the BBC show that viewing figures for last night’s debate averaged at around 9.4 million over the 90 minutes with a peak of around 9.9 million at 9pm. With around 38 million people registered to vote in England as of December 2009, that is potentially an enormous percentage of the electorate.

Compared to the usual 9 million or so viewers that Coronation Street and East Enders each attract, such high viewing figures for the leaders’ debates suggest that they might become one of the most influential aspects of future campaigns. That said, it will be important to see if interest stays as high for the remaining two debates.

The new media’s reach seems tame when compared to these television figures. The Labour Party has just under 15,000 followers on Twitter, the Conservatives are doing better with just under 27,000 and the Lib Dems are behind both at just over 13,000. Between the three main parties, that’s barely 55,000 people connected to the daily happening of their parties.

It is true that smaller parties with smaller platforms (and purses) are doing well by the new media. The Green Party, for example, has 11,000 followers on Twitter – not too far behind the Lib Dems. And the figures for the official party Twitter pages don’t account for the number of people following their MPs or other ministers directly. However, MPs’ followings vary hugely - some such as Nick Clegg have as many as 16,000 (more than his own party’s total) but ordinary MPs can range from Eric Pickles who has 4,500 to Tessa Jowell who has a meagre 660 or so.

The strange anomaly in all of this is Sarah Brown, Gordon Brown’s wife: she has over 1.1 million followers on Twitter.

Looking at Facebook, there are both official party pages where people can become a fan of a page as well as more spontaneous groups. Here are the figures for the official pages of the three main parties as of today:

  • Labour: 22,132 fans
  • Conservatives: 46,022 fans
  • Liberal Democrats: 26,185 fans

Political groups created for fun can often get more fans than the official pages. One such group takes its name from the social media campaign last Christmas to beat the X-Factor winner for the number one spot in the charts: “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into Office”. This group has an impressive 43,493 members.
 
An interesting figure is the number of members in a group called: “I bet I can find a million people who DON’T want David Cameron as our PM.” A total of 158, 805 people have joined this group so far. The creators of this group (ordinary Facebook users) haven’t reached their one million target, but the numbers they have attracted tell us something about the role of the new media. The same applies to the Rage Against the Machine group created by LibDem supporters.
 
The actual value of Facebook pages and groups in engaging in political debate is dubious. Users often join groups because the fact they have done so appears in a News Feed of everything that they are doing – this feed is seen by friends and they can share a joke and exchange comments about the groups they’ve been joining.
 
There aren’t any stats (that I’m aware of) showing how many people actually return to the political (or other) pages they become fans of or groups they join. The sentiment is very short-lived. There is actually a group on Facebook that summarises this sentiment perfectly: “I read the group name, I laugh, I join, I never look at it again”.
 
The statistics show plainly that the joke is more valuable than the actual political belief behind it. If 43,493 people believe they can get the Lib Dems into office if they managed to get Rage Against the Machine to #1, how come barely 60 per cent of that number have actually joined the official Liberal Democrats page?
 
Twitter is a slightly different case – it is an ongoing conversation and a lot of media commentators have a lot to say. By definition Twitter followers are having more interaction with the people they follow: what they see when they log onto Twitter is a live feed of Tweets from everyone they’ve chosen to hear from.
 
More serious, or purportedly so, is the blogosphere, both in terms of written blogs and YouTube channels set up by political parties. Traffic on political blogs has increased by 18 per cent since the beginning of the week. Analysis by Hitwise Intelligence notes that very little political traffic is going through the main party websites – the vast majority is on blogs.
 
Again, it is difficult to quantify how much difference blog traffic makes to the electorate. In real terms, even after an 18 per cent increase in traffic over one week, traffic to political blogs only accounts for 0.036 per cent of total internet traffic in the UK.
 
Finally, to YouTube. Here, the level of engagement varies massively. The video summary of Labour’s manifesto has been viewed 52,635 times so far. This is more than double the number of people following the party on Twitter. Nearly 42,000 people have viewed the latest election broadcast in just four days.
 
However, compare these figures to other videos – videos of the politicians themselves, talking directly about policy and showing them out in the community - and the results are poorer. Gordon Brown’s message to Asda mums for example has only been viewed 1,206 times. 
 
Lib Dem video views are significantly lower than Labour and Conservative views. The latest party election broadcast was only seen 5,827 times in 3 days – this is even after the media frenzy that followed Nick Clegg’s performance during the leaders’ debate. Some video views are as low as around 270 after 4 days of being posted.
 
David Cameron’s and the Conservatives’ channel, WebCameronUK, has the highest viewing figure of the election campaign so far – a video of Cameron rallying his campaign office has been watched around 80,500 times. Their manifesto video, however, has fallen below Labour’s, receiving around 44,000 views.
 
Numbers, of course, are not everything. Although the numbers of viewers on YouTube are far smaller than those who watched the TV debate, they are more likely to have specifically sought out the politics they consume. Many of them would have clicked to videos from links posted on social networking sites like Twitter. Media Tweeters in particular unleashed a flood of Tweets when manifestos were being launched containing links to articles and videos.
 
Watching on television is significantly less effort and does not necessarily require an audience as engaged as one on the internet. Online followers are the most committed. They could quite easily spend hours following the commentary live on Twitter or chatting on Facebook pages – at home and at work.
 
The biggest question is the extent to which new media will change the face of elections. In the 2008 US Presidential election, it is well documented that Barack Obama used tools such as Twitter, iPhone applications and text messaging to boost his campaign. He currently boasts  around 3.7 million followers on Twitter – many hundreds of times more than our three main political parties put together
 
The important point about Obama’s use of these technologies was not that he used them to reach out to people but that they offered new, faster, cheaper and more far-reaching ways to organise his campaign.
 
Campaigning still very much depends on the traditional methods of endless knocking on doors, shaking millions of hands and, if unavoidable, kissing babies. Although the Obama campaign showed how to use new media to generate revenue, ultimately, as The Economist points out, the money raised was used for old-fashioned campaign tools like television adverts and flights across the country to meet the people.
 
The figures for the new media seem to show that the relationship between political campaigning and the new media may be somewhat muddled. It doesn’t yet seem that a new media generation is being connected to politics but that politics is merely catching up to connect with the new media generation.
 
The outbreak of Twitters, Facebookers and bloggers seem very much to be servicing a small minority who are already relatively engaged with the process – the figures seem to support that. The difference for these IT-savvy activists is that they now get a minute by minute, ultra-fast, ultra-integrated and ultra-diverse service from the new media.
 
Although the internet has in many ways been a great leveller and social connector, it doesn’t seem that it has, so far, succeeded in doing this for politics. What I believe we’re seeing in the excitement about the new media and political campaigning is really just an extension of our general excitement about the new ways we communicate.