Labour's Net Strategy

I've been away from the computer quite a bit lately and I've only just learnt of Labour's decision to appoint Zack Exley to manage the party's Internet campaign for the next election.  There's a good treatment of this topic on Damien Mulley's blog.  Some good will come of this.  At the very least it will generate some extra traffic on political websites, parties or otherwise.  Will it do Labour any good?  That depends on whether the web strategy goes beyond sophisticated online production of brochure material and targeted emailing. 

In other words the party will have to take some risks and see where the web campaign goes.  Obviously the Internet strategy will have to cohere with the broader message of the party in the election campaign, otherwise the Fianna Fáil backroom people, who go through all opposition statements line by line, will find much to exploit.  So the web campaign will have to have some degree of operational autonomy and the party elders must resist any temptation to engage in control freakery.  Above all the party's approach online will have to be credible and honest.

How will we recognise such qualities?  Henry Farrell, in his contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar on Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom argues that the blogosphere works as well as it does because of three key norms – linking, attribution and authenticity.  In relation to the latter it is worth quoting Henry at some length:

Roughly speaking, I take this norm to say that individual bloggers should represent their own points of view in an honest and straightforward fashion. The comparative advantage of bloggers vis-a-vis other kinds of pundits is that they have (or should have) a strong personal voice based on their internal beliefs. This distinguishes the blogosphere from many other spheres of publication, where individuals are expected to represent the positions of their institution, or their political party rather than their own personal position on the issue at hand. It also distinguishes blogging from genres of writing (op-eds, speeches, political autobiographies) where authorship is blurred and ghost-writing by others than the official author are considered to be perfectly acceptable. Bloggers who are perceived as not representing their own position on the issues, or as having their material written for them by others, are likely to have a hard time getting their writing accepted by other bloggers.

Politicians who write blogs are primarily politicians and not bloggers.  But authenticity is a norm that should be upheld as much as possible.  Blogging that appears to produce ghost-written party material rather than conviction-driven personal opinions and argument will lack credibility and will be easily exposed for what it is.  Blogging is only part of a web strategy but it is the one element that could allow politicians to develop new modes of communication and to learn how to engage with a strata of society hitherto largely ignored by the political class. 

 

Comments

[Damien Blake]

I think the "tone" of voice is vital on a website. Among the first comments on my blog (and about it elsewhere) last year where that it was too much like a series of Press Releases. Those comments were right.

In politics (even at the low level I'm at- Town Councillor) you are always aware that everything you say can come back to bite you. That, together with the ever masterful Google and web.archive.org, means most politicians will be slow to be as frank online as bloggers have been.

I've changed the way I write on the website substantially. As I see it, there's no point re-hashing things that could be read in the local papers (we have 6 local papers covering politics in Letterkenny every week). Nobody cares that much.

The website I have allows me to connect with a very different demographic, the demographic that doesn't read the papers but are searching through google, irishblogs.ie and technorati for the issues that they care about. I watch my stats and referrer logs to see what people are reading, and what they're looking for. This, together with the emails I receive, has been of great use to me as a public representative.

As regards Press Releases, a point worth remembering is that most senior politicians don't write their own releases, so it's unlikely we'll see them blogging any time soon (as we would consider blogging anyway). Ciaran Cuffe is going down the right road, Joan Burton isn't.