Politics and social media: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

This month I’ve continued the theme from the last post on TV brands and social media,  and have applied our social media reputation scoring to the political domain.

So whose performance is good, whose is bad and which party’s approach is downright ugly?

This is particularly relevant this month as David Cameron has managed to create his own PR disaster by having his image airbrushed on his ad, then bearing the brunt of a social media backlash as dozens of internet memes did the rounds (see below).

A little explanation of how the Social Media Reputation index works: the overall scores are comprised of ‘noise’ (number / reach of comments on blogs, networks etc) and ‘sentiment’ (the relative positivity of the noise).

A ‘recency’ metric is also applied to reflect the transient nature of content, so last year’s comment still has less impact regardless of medium! The index, out of 100, ranks contenders in context of other competitors in each particular sector.

Here are the scores on the doors:

Lib Dems

Whilst the Liberal Democrats achieve the lowest noise score, they take the accolade for “best improvement”, which shows a steadily growing presence within social media channels. 

Both the party and their leader have active Twitter accounts with healthy followings. They have even managed to get to grips with Twitter hashtags. Nick Clegg has his own official Facebook page, which is regularly updated with multimedia content and has over 3,000 fans.

Verdict =  Bad (but improving)

Labour

While the ‘noise’ score for Labour has increased over the last few months, the sentiment score has remained stagnant. It seems the recruitment of ‘Twitter Tsar’,  MP Kerry McCarthy, has not paid-off yet. Their presence on Facebook is restricted to a few unofficial groups, and a content-starved page dedicated to Gordon Brown.

Verdict = Bad

Conservative

The Tories disobeyed one of the cardinal rules – attempting to distort reality by photoshopping an image of leader David Cameron and mislead a generation who are quick to celebrate their inability to be duped.

So, in SMR terms, the Conservatives’ noise score has risen but their sentiment score has taken a nosedive. Twitter and the blogosphere were set alight by ‘alternative’ Conservative campaign posters (see below). It began on gofourth.co.uk, and was quickly picked up by Clifford Slinger, who created http://mydavidcameron.com/, which received 90,000 visits in the first two weeks.

Twitter made sure the posters were widely discussed and shared, keeping the joke alive. The party couldn’t even retaliate, as one quick-thinker set up mygordonbrown.com to re-direct to...you know where.

Verdict = Bad (rapidly getting ugly)

Some reworkings of David Cameron's campaign