Ian Douglas at the Telegraph has had a look at the online presence of the London Mayoral candidates and has a similar conclusion to mine [Web oiling US campaign, not so much in London]: Boris is winning.
Ian points me at a Ken supporter website, which is dire, possibly worse than useless as it's not responding at all to the smears.
Brian Paddick has a website too. Plus Facebook/Twitter but they're unused - which, again, is worse than useless because an untended web presence provokes a general feeling of neglect. All the US campaigns learnt that lesson very quickly.
Brian does have more 'standard' web campaign components than Boris though, including SMS, which is pretty sophisticated (Obama only started that a few months ago). Like this banner:
Plus the LibDems do have an organised and networked presence online and have had for a while. Experience helps and may help Brian but I would expect the Tories to copy him.
Douglas loves Barack Obama's website. Actually, you could now look at all the Democrat candidate sites and many Republican's and say similar things. A year ago some were leading but everyone's caught up - so there's precious little first mover advantage. However for both Obama (youth) and Ron Paul (Libertarians) their natural supporters are web-savvy anyway. So there is an advantage for them in being able to use the web to organise/fundraise their base where it was much harder before.
The problem for Ken is that he's a bit like Guiliani in his approach to online. It's very obvious that it's not a serious factor in his campaign. As time wears on, this will become more and more obvious - and cost him votes.
Tuesday, January 22
London Mayoral race online: postscript
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Not quite sure what you meant by "Brian Paddick has a website too. Plus Facebook/Twitter but they're unused" as his campaign is certainly using both!
ReplyDeleteBrian's got a very active Facebook presence (and was a user of Facebook before he became a candidate - this isn't just an election thing) with profile, group and page.
The Twitter service is also being used to send out updates, though as it's fairly new the archive isn't bulging with old messages yet.
jolly quick response!
ReplyDeleteI'd count facebook + twitter as 'web presence', the site's something else.
glad to hear it on you really using them! twitter seems to be coming into its own too - the bhutto assassination showed this - as people use it more. it seems much less like a trendy thing that it once did.
as I said, your site's much better than Boris but they will copy you.
Good luck!