Social (democrat) bookmarking
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007Look at this. It certainly looks the business.
In recent years, Labour seem to have eschewed the Tories’ strategy of slick New Media launches, aimed at offline column inches rather than online impact. From ‘Dave in India’, through Webcameron’s diminishing returns, to the recent banner ads, the Tories have very pragmatically spent online in order to look innovative to the offline majority, who will never actually bother with this politico-geekery themselves. It didn’t matter really what they did, so long as they looked stylish, modern and open, and had enough buzzwords on-site to impress the scribblers.
Put against this, Labour seem in the last year to have taken this web stuff all a bit too seriously. Rather than media launches, they’ve worked through a bunch of policy consultations, and tools designed to up their supporters’ web literacy. The byzantine MPURLs system is a world away from Webcameron, and seems to show a party actually looking for ways to take the technology seriously. Focusing internaly has had benefits in building a core of activists who are web literate, and I think is the correct strategy long term, but it’s let the Tories lap us more than once in the race to be seen as innovative. (more…)
