A story got me rather riled today. Tory Politico, a blogger that in their own words, aims to “highlight the failures of the current government and promote the Conservative Party” had got in contact with the Tory press office to ask for a copy of a recent press release relating to a letter sent to Gordon Brown from David Cameron. Sounds like a perfectly legitimate and justified request. Well, apparently not.
Tory Politico was faced with what seems like a totally backward and baffling response from the press officer. “[I] was wondering if you could send me a copy of the press release that’s just been issued about the letter send from David Cameron to the Prime Minister” asked Tory Politico who received the response (I’ll paraphrase) “sorry I cant help you”, “bloggers don’t count as media so I cant send it to you”, “we feel that independent bloggers do not provide an efficient means of communicating the Conservative message”, “bloggs [sic] are not important”.
Now firstly, I just want to make it clear I’m not on some sort of crusade in support of blogs. I don’t need to crusade for blogging. It has already proved its importance, relevance and influence within almost every industry. From politics to technology and parenting to environmental issues. Nor am I on any politcal rant here. My politcal leaning is pretty much undecided at the moment.
Back to the issue… I’m sorry, what? Blogs are not important? You are a political party trying to rally support, influence the voting public and get your message out through as many channels as possible and you don’t think blogs are important? This blogger is an advocate for your party, he is spending his unpaid, free time to try to pursuade people that you are the party to vote for and you don’t think that is important? No matter how many readers and subscribers he has, no matter what his Technorati rating is (if that’s worth anything anymore) and no matter how influential he is, you don’t see it value in spending few seconds it would take to attach a press release to an email and send it to this blogger?
The imporance and value of politicians engaging with social media is clear and proven. It was shown blatantly by Obama’s victory last year. There has been so much coverage on the value that Obama’s social media campaign added to his political campaign. A few facts from Pew;
“74% of internet users–representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election”
“Nearly one in five (18%) internet users posted their thoughts, comments or questions about the campaign on an online forum such as a blog or social networking site.”
“One in three internet users forwarded political content to others.”
“Fully 83% of those age 18-24 have a social networking profile, and two-thirds of young profile owners took part in some form of political activity on these sites in 2008.”
Obama’s social media hub MyBarackObama actively encouraged users to create their own blogs about the campaign. At the end of the campaign, there were 2 million profiles with 400,000 blog posts. That’s 400,000 blog posts by advocates of Obama, all trying to spread the word and get the message out. And the Tories don’t think blogging is important.
Well good luck to them.
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