Orange Digital Campaigning Awards (NOT)

I was kindly tagged by Matt Wardman in a meme post related to the Orange Digital Campaigning awards, seemingly for parties and candidates who had the best campaigns during the election.

Now, my reading of blogs has dropped off a cliff both before and after the election, I rarely use Facebook and my conscious decision to let the weeds grow somewhat on this blog won't help reverse that online slide but I thought I would pick up Matt's meme and see what thoughts I could bring to the topic.

From my rather poor vantage point, I didn't get the impression that this was much of an online election despite the heavy billing otherwise and so a set of digital campaign awards will, I fear, have a scant return. Certainly Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report disseminated polls relentlessly, Tory Bear struggled (fruitlessly in the end) with the #KerryOut campaign and Mike Smithson of Political Betting covered many unreported angles, albeit often with unanswered questions as the main thrust of the post, but was there anything out there on the blogosphere that really set the heather alight, captured the imagination and sneaked into the national spotlight? Not from what I could make out. Not, I hasten to add, that blogging the election for its own sake isn't an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.

I enjoyed my SeatWatch series on here and it generated a good bit of debate I like to think. It was noteworthy that suggesting which party was going to win which seat tended to generate significantly more comments than merely talking about whatever the issue of the day was. I guess the range of opinion from the optimistic/deluded who predicted SNP/Lib Dem gains (myself very much included) to the doom-mongering but fully vindicated 'there'll be no change' (myself, fence-sittingly, somewhat included) meant that debate was inevitable.

So are there lessons to be learned for what a blogger or a candidate can do online, keeping in mind it is now less than a year until the Scottish Parliament elections? Probably not, best to knock doors than tap keyboards. If you do venture online, do what you enjoy I guess and don't hope to persuade too many or change too much. Labour did seem to have a good Facebook network on the go and their #labourdoorstep twiter tag seems to go down very well in a (somewhat ironically) 'we're all in this together' kind of way.

In terms of the Orange awards in particular, apparently they are as follows:

- Best use of digital campaigning by a Political Party
- Best use of digital campaigning by a Candidate
- Best non-party digital initiatives
- Funniest use of digital initiatives
- Worst example of digital initiatives

There is no nomination process so, as Matt points out, some local brilliance could easily be missed, not that I have any local brilliance to suggest given that I wasn't even in Scotland for the entirety of the official campaign period and my London constituency was thin on the ground in terms of online initiatives. I do recall Scott of Love and Garbage has a potential nomination for the worst category though, not that it stopped Michael Connarty getting elected with a huge majority though.

There has been a lot more MSPs, MPs and PPCs embracing Twitter but I can't remember any specific 'initiatives' as such that took off. Indeed, it was a non-candidate and even, as far as I am aware, a non party member who had the best Scottish initiative with Bella Caledonia and his undoubtedly successful (but still ultimately inconsequential) #ScotlandSpeaks campaign that politicians, journalists and bloggers got fairly heavily involved in. I seem to remember a little bit of favourable mainstream media exposure too but I can't remember specifically what was said or where.

Had I still been a voter in Edinburgh North & Letih I would have had 4 Tweeters and 3 bloggers to choose from but I daresay that my fellow constituents and I would have had little to change our minds with from any of their online outlets available. Unless you really hated trams and weren't aware how closely Calum Cashley shared your views.

Crucially, the mere fact that there were no unexpected gains in Scotland and no constituencies where the share of the vote was significantly adjusted as a result of any campaign, be it offline or online, makes it difficult to point to Scottish examples that should be nominated for these awards.

The battle in Scottish voters' minds generally revolved around which candidate was best placed to keep the Tories out and you don't need a blog, tweet or facebook account to tell you much about that I'm afraid. As much as I may have tried.

For this meme I have been asked to nominate the best use of digital campaigning and although I could probably think of even better candidates if I did some research and/or racked my brains, I will have to give second place to the #KerryIn campaign to counterbalance the #KerryOut one. The Bristol East MP saw a swing against her to the Tories of 4.5% but this is favourable to the national swing of 5-6% so she must have been doing something right. Given that the Tories went backwards in London and Scotland, this is arguably all the more impressive from Kerry McCarthy.

However, the best example of online campaigning at the 2010 election is, for me, the #ScotlandSpeaks campaign in protest at the inclusion of only the three main parties at the leader debates which shaped the election campaign so significantly. There really was a lot of input with not much backlift Mike Small managed to build a sizeable groundswell of protest and lodge the objections of the SNP's exclusion respectfully but forcibly. I am therefore linking back to Matt Wardman in the hope that he will pick this up and add it to his list (so, if you agree with the nomination, please click through the link).


I shall tag: Malc in the Burgh, Two Doctors, Tom Harris, Yousuf Hamid, Stephen Glenn and Caron Lindsay to keep the meme going but I daresay it's open season on discussing and nominating on this...