Basically the internet used to be this thing, it was over there, it was in a cupboard, it was the guys who fixed your mouse who were the same guys who updated the stuff on the website. The guys in the press office would churn out a press release, it would be slapped up on the website, it would have a little picture put next to it, and that was the way you ran a website. What our team, which was brought in very early in David Cameron’s leadership, was in essence brought in to do was really to wrestle that responsibility away from an IT department, which has a very particular function, and move that across to a more communications-focused team. Essentially we are a marketing team, an advertising team, a communications-focused team. We have technical skills within our team but it’s not our predominant reason for being. … That’s the overwhelming change within the organization (Interview 9, May 2010).
The Conservatives’ new media staff went from being “out in the cold, excluded,” to having their leader, Rishi Saha, present at every senior campaign war room meeting during the 2010 campaign. The online staff had their own budget and reported directly to the party leader. In some respects, this is remarkably similar to the model of online campaigning established by Obama in 2008 (see chapter 6). And as we shall see, this approach was also adopted by the British Labour Party in 2010, though with a different inflection.
How has this approach embedded itself in the practices of campaign headquarters? First, the Conservatives sought to use the internet as part of a broader attempt to “modernize” how they presented themselves to the electorate. The party’s then director of strategy, Steve Hilton, clearly saw the symbolic power of internet communication as useful for softening and “humanizing” the party leadership and conveying a new ethos of openness and willingness to engage with the public. The newer medium and its logic became part of the newer message. Elder continuously refers to the importance of being “honest” and “transparent” and speaks of the party making “big, big efforts to communicate in different ways and emphasize different qualities.” The web is central here because “it makes you look fresh and modern and innovative.” While this approach had a direct impact on the party’s presence on the web, it was also aimed at newspaper and broadcast media, who were looking for evidence of Cameron’s attempt to move the Conservative Party away from the “nasty party” image it acquired during the 1990s. Inside the top echelon of the party, the web has therefore become totemic of an important cultural shift.
Second, the party has sought to integrate online opinion-formers into the orbit of its press relations. It did this by actively encouraging the formation of a network of elite bloggers and online activists that constitute an important part of what amounts to a new extended and distributed “Westminster village.” Organized around high-profile blogs like those of Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, and the activist community Conservative Home led by Tim Montgomerie and Jonathan Isaby, this network began to provide important lines of communication between the grassroots and the leadership. From the party’s 2006 annual conference onward, bloggers were given press passes and were encouraged to organize fringe meetings. While Conservative multimillionaire donor Lord Ashcroft bought a majority stake in a new parent company he established for Conservative Home in 2009 (M. Bell, 2009), thereby putting beyond any doubt that Montgomerie and his team were seen as a select elite, the relationship between central office and these new foci for grassroots discourse has not always been harmonious. Elder speaks of Montgomerie as being “treated like a journalist” and likens dealing with Conservative Home to “herding cats,” a term that implies that headquarters has sometimes attempted to steer and control. But Elder goes on to put it in a way that implies a more equal balance of power: “the centre-right blogosphere has been a critical friend rather than necessarily a mouthpiece,” he says. These prominent websites are seen as a tremendous resource for the party but they are also rivals for attention, especially during election campaigns, when the party leadership wants to target floating voters with its own website (Interview 9, May 2010).
Integrating online opinion with traditional “press” functions also works in another way. It is significant how party central office staff used online media throughout the campaign. Twitter use cut across the divide between new media and press officer staff inside Conservative headquarters, but there were interesting residual logics at play in each camp. The Conservatives’ chief press officer Henry Macrory used Twitter as a rapid rebuttal and propaganda tool to communicate in real time with a large though still select group of political journalists. This stridently partisan approach owed a great deal to the traditions of behind-the-scenes spin doctor practice and targeted private text messaging that I discussed in the previous chapter. Several journalists and bloggers commented on the often-caustic nature of Macrory’s tweets (Political Scrapbook, 2010). Yet Elder and some of his colleagues took a gentler approach, one shaped by the informal, conversational, and eclectic genres of discourse in online social media environments. They tweeted very regularly in support of their party’s position, but seldom did they use personal attacks, and they also interspersed their political tweets with nonpolitical content. These messages provided resources for retweeting among time-pressed Conservative leaders and candidates. When I ask him about the extent to which this was consciously planned, Elder says it was not, though he does admit that they “know what the rules of the game are” and were all “playing the safety-first rule” during the campaign.
A third way in which the Conservatives came to integrate the internet into their campaigning took the form of a number of prominent experiments in online engagement. Yet the logic of these experiments is to influence coverage in older media. In March 2010, the party organized its own “crowd-sourced” response to the Labour government’s pre-election Budget, but the more than a thousand public comments this attracted were not published on the web in real time, out of fear that the exercise might be hijacked by supporters of the other parties or even give advance notice to the government of what the Conservative leadership might use in their post-Budget critique. Thus, what seems on the surface to be a model exercise in democratic engagement using the affordances of the internet actually becomes disciplined by the logics of control and spin and the temporal rhythms of broadcasting.
For the 2010 election the Conservatives launched MyConservatives.com, a tailor-made online social network site modeled loosely on the U.S. Democrats’ MyBarackObama.com (see chapter 6). Central office encouraged candidates to establish profiles on “MyCon” and use it to raise funds for specific issues. They also saw it as a way to energize local volunteers, including, unusually for British politics, those who were not paid-up party members. The results were mixed. Elder says that around a hundred candidates (out of 650) “used it really well,” that “thousands” of volunteers were involved and it was “a moderate success.” MyCon also caused some internal friction between the party treasurer, who wanted to use traditional fundraising methods, and the communications team, who were more interested in experimenting with online engagement as a route to fundraising (Interview 9, May 2010).
But to what extent do the stated aims of these types of experiments actually matter at all? An important theme of these interviews with party and government personnel is the value that is ascribed to using the internet to gain exposure in older media. The MyCon online social network received mainstream coverage from the BBC’s technology correspondents. The crowd-sourced budget response resulted in a story in the Evening Standard about planned changes to the pension system. “I don’t think in our wildest dreams we ever thought we were going to get a story out of what came out of there … ” says Elder. In other words, the criteria for success in these experiments in online engagement are not necessarily those associated with the participatory logics of digital media. Instead, they often derive from the strategic logics of the “press” campaign practices that evolved with older media. There is a need to be seen by broadcast and newspaper media as eye-catching, fresh, and different and to offer
visible evidence of such, which professional journalists can then use in their stories about the campaign.
These hybrid newer media–older media logics also run through the fourth way in which the blurring of the distinctions between “new media,” “press,” and communications is being played out: the growth of a much more carefully considered approach to the online campaign and a growing awareness of what are becoming the settled realities of web use among mass publics. Integrating digital media into the campaign is now about proving online campaigning’s worth as a system of practices based upon “specialist” or even “hidden” expertise that can deliver hard, calculable results. (I explored this in relation to the 2008 Obama campaign in chapter 6 and do so in relation to Donald Trump in 2016 in chapter 10). In this sense, social media engagement, apart from its value in attracting elite media coverage to the campaign along the lines I just discussed, is often window-dressing. What really matters now are the dark arts of Google AdWords, search engine optimization, and the geodemographic targeting of online messages. All of this is now situated in the context of a media system in which it is acknowledged that broadcasters usually have mastery over the temporal rhythms of the campaign, so the online campaign will do better if it synchronizes with those rhythms even though online campaign professionals are the only ones able to provide the high levels of technical expertise and insider knowledge required to master these new technologies.
The biggest overall shift in 2010 (across all parties) was the amount of time and financial resources devoted to rebuilding websites to tap into the advantages gained by writing copy that ensures a site will appear prominently in Google’s search results, so-called “search engine optimization.” These advantages can also come from buying Google AdWord keywords so that web users searching for information are more likely to be presented with links to the party’s main website. The AdWord campaigns are planned in advance to coincide with the big older media-driven events of the campaign, which in 2010 were the televised prime ministerial debates. But AdWords are also changed in response to unforeseen developments, such as breaking news stories. Just as television messaging became obsessively focused around targeting the undecided voter from the 1980s onwards, now online strategy is being targeted away from the activists and toward those larger sections of the public likely to be quickly Googling the election, often during or soon after a big broadcasting moment, or even on election day itself. Elder explains:
The center of the project was we took a decision in 2008 to rebuild Conservatives.com around 26 key policy areas, to make sure that everything on the site pointed via a database to reference those 26 key policy areas, to make sure that the Conservative Party first and foremost won on search, so people could search “Conservative education,” “Conservative immigration” and find that … Google search, Google ads, were a massive, massive part of our strategy as well, for reasons that I won’t sort of [go into] … We used it both strategically, on days like the budget, to make sure our message was out there and then when it came round to the election campaign we used far more of a blanket approach, so if you’re searching for anything from your local Labour MP all the way through to terms like “hung parliament,” “polling booth,” “where’s my polling station?,” you would see messages from us and we would tailor that very much accordingly, and I think that history will show that to be a success. So that’s not sexy stuff, if you like, but for me it’s the reason we won the digital war. The fact is that we had digital media correspondents … from the BBC and the Financial Times … who were working on this and they always want to know about the buzzy thing, they always want to know what you’re doing on Facebook, what you’re doing on Twitter. And the fact is that if you pay too much attention to these things, if you get pulled into whatever the fashion of the day is, you lose … . You end up speaking to people that aren’t your key audience. So we were all about floating voters. Our website was designed for one group of people, floating voters, on one particular day—May 6 as it turned out to be (Interview 9, May 2010).
This new approach to online campaigning has also become embedded in the Labour Party, though here there are important differences of emphasis. Labour had its own Google AdWords campaign in 2010. Though less lavishly funded than the Conservatives’, it was still strategically oriented around the broadcast-mediated events of the campaign. As “Mary,” a senior campaign official based in Labour headquarters explains:
We did a lot around the debates in particular and had a really great guy working on AdWords who understood quality scores, and we were getting awesome value for money and positioning was working really well for us. We were competing with the Conservatives because we spent a lot of time thinking about quality score and making sure that the keywords on the landing page matched the keywords in the AdWord itself. All that stuff that Google rewards you for with better positioning and lower CPC [cost per click], we were mastering that. They [the Conservatives] obviously had one thing they were putting on the AdWords and they were just blasting them out to thousands of keywords. If you understand how AdWords work, Labour’s got a far more sophisticated strategy on this, by virtue of the fact that we had to—rewriting the copy, testing it, doing different variations, and constantly updating and changing it to reflect what was and wasn’t working. That was good (Interview 21, June 2010).
Like the Conservatives, Labour worked for several years before the 2010 election to optimize its websites for maximum impact on Google. Even local candidate sites were subjected to this logic, as central staff advised constituency parties to try to raise their profiles by piggybacking on the search terms that local people might be using to find out about services in their areas, such as the rebuilding of schools and hospitals—a policy area that Labour was keen to stress. Labour also integrated its new media staff into the main campaign war room. Every morning, a senior figure from the new media team attended the 7:00 a.m. meetings, which usually consisted of about ten people, including Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell, Douglas Alexander, and longstanding party pollster Philip Gould. By the close of the election Labour had a historically large number of headquarters staff—twelve in total—working on the online aspects of the campaign, though as we shall see, what precisely counts as “online” is becoming more difficult to distinguish.
The central difference between Labour and the Conservatives is that Labour placed much more emphasis on attempting to integrate the web with their ground campaign. The Labour staff I interviewed all speak of their background in “organizing” as well as “communications” and of the need to energize their own supporters rather than use the web to appeal to undecided voters, a goal they believe is better achieved by other media, particularly television (Interview 21, June 2010; Interview 26, January 2011). Indeed, this is a source of pride, a rejection of what “David,” a senior campaign official, sees as the inauthentic “PR” ethos of the Conservatives (Interview 26, January 2011). So Labour also sought to learn from the Obama model, but it had an advantage over the Conservatives because as early as 2006 it had established Membersnet, a rudimentary online social network of sorts. Labour also managed to embed an Obama-style virtual phone banking system early on, which allowed party members to call members of the public in key constituencies and instantly submit the responses online to a central database. “Cynthia,” a former campaign official for Labour describes Membersnet and the online phone bank as “the big successes of the 2010 election” (Interview 20, June 2010). But as we saw in chapters 6 and 7, the Obama model is as much about older media as it is about the internet, and the internet is most powerful when it is used—by parties, journalists, celebrities, or members of the public—in consonance with television. Labour sought to use the same approach in the 2010 British campaign. As David says: “As a digital unit we have to face both ways and have an understanding and ability to move on both fronts. The relationship between the new media team and the press team has always been a good one … Working together, there’s not a barrier to it as much a
s there was years ago … It’s now a fairly inclusive process.” (Interview 26, January 2011). But how does this relationship actually work in practice and what are the outcomes?
“Strategy” and “Tactics”
Mary, a senior campaign official for Labour, makes an important distinction between what she terms “strategy” and “tactics.” By strategy she means embedding the internet in field operations—gathering e-mails, creating and refining databases, targeting and mobilizing activists via Membersnet to spread the word about the party’s policies and its candidates, and spurring people to take real-space action such as door-knocking, canvassing, and driving voters to the polls. By tactics, she means using the internet, and social media in particular, to attract attention from broadcasters and newspapers in the hope of “influencing the media and influencing the story” (Interview 21, June 2010). Mary believes that using the internet for field operations is much more likely to produce concrete results, but there is always a strong temptation among senior politicians and press officers to use the internet for merely tactical purposes, to get a quick hit from broadcast media coverage. Labour had its own share of tactical behavior in 2010, such as consulting on their manifesto via Twitter, and asking young activist blogger “Bevanite Ellie” Gellard to speak at the televised rally to launch the campaign. Mary is keen to stress that Gellard “wasn’t manufactured, she was genuine,” but acknowledges that the party communications team were “still playing old media’s game.” Older media logics are here presented as diluting the potential of newer media.
This distinction between the norm of strategy and the norm of tactics has deep roots in British parties’ web use and it goes right to the very top of government. “Bill,” a senior official in the Cabinet Office, speaks of “a big divide” between the “strategic communications” people and the “news” people inside government departments. While the strategic communications staff have integrated digital communication into their approach, he says, the press teams still tend to “think in terms of print and broadcast media” and of how the internet might fit into their universe (Interview 11, May 2010). Bill tells the story of how strategic communications staff, unhappy with the large number of silent television screens constantly tuned to Sky News and BBC News in government offices, introduced a social media monitoring tool provided by web company Netvibes. Interestingly, these skirmishes were recounted to me in another interview—with “John,” a senior official in the Foreign Office: “for some reason, I’m getting more and more TV screens put in my office, and I don’t want another bloody TV screen, thank you very much. I don’t need it, I don’t want that, but they keep putting them in” (Interview 2, April 2010). Bill at the Cabinet Office argues that the shifts have come in those departments where ministers have become attuned to online communication and have instructed their communications staff to integrate it into their daily work. He says of his own job: “This isn’t an IT role.”
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