Fire up Photoshop... The election is coming to social media
We have had another taste of the speed with which the forthcoming election will be fought when an election poster revealed by Labour was quickly parodied by the Conservatives.
Labour put a less than flattering head of Tory leader David Cameron upon the surly shoulders of hard hitting retro TV cop character Gene Hunt, sat on the bonnet of his Audi Quattro, with the legend: ‘Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s’.Obviously it aimed to float the resonating spectre of when Thatcher was Prime Minister, but it did make Cameron look somewhat cooler than probably intended.
The Conservatives Party quickly adapted the poster with a more flattering photo of Cameron and the new legend: ‘Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for a change’. It also thanked Labour for donating the original idea.
This promptly captured countless headlines, tweets and blogs illustrating how social media and its fast moving opportunity for rebuttal is going to be used in the coming election. Such campaigns always bring out the best – and the worst of creativity. You can see how excited the Daily Mail got here.
Social media will only heighten this. This might be a good time to acknowledge while plenty of influential people may be online and using social media, around half of businesses do not even have a website yet. Penetration of social media is still at a relatively early stage – something easily forgotten.
Like the businesses we advise on best use of social media and public relations in Newbury where we are based and across Berkshire and the Thames Valley, you need to be using multiple channels for promotion. It is a false economy to rely on a few noisy channels and miss out the prospects, or indeed voters, in less glamorous areas.
Equally, the local candidates here in Newbury have not really engaged with social media yet and it is too late to have any serious impact among the influential people actively engaged in this area.
It is going to be an interesting few weeks!
How do you think the political parties should be using social media? Indeed, how shouldn’t they?