My friend / colleague / client Mark Pack gave a presentation at last week’s Social Media 09 conference on ‘Liberal Democrats and social media’: in fact, it was a case study on the work we did to relaunch Lynne Featherstone’s website. Although they don’t make much sense in isolation (nor should they), here they are for the record:
(I wasn’t present to hear Iain Dale declare the site ‘one of the best political websites [he’d] ever seen’, but I am assured it’s an accurate transcription – from his opening remarks at a LibDem Conference fringe meeting, I’m told.)
Mark’s analysis yields one interesting result for anyone in political social media: despite being exactly the same mechanism, and often identical content, there’s a marked preference for ‘blog’ content as opposed to the more conventional ‘news releases’. Mark has crunched the numbers, but actually, it’s obvious from even the briefest glance: the blog posts get comments, the news releases (almost) never do.
But here’s my favourite fact about the relaunch. One of Lynne’s core campaigning messages is how she stands up to the Labour-dominated Haringey council. And if you search Google for ‘haringey council’, Lynne’s automated ‘issue page’ (with its far-from-flattering meta description) is result no5 behind the council itself (twice), Directgov and Wikipedia. I’m quite pleased with that; they probably aren’t.