Friday 14 May 2010

What happened to the student vote?

In the early stages of the Election campaign there was a considerable focus on student voters. With echoes of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, political parties scrambled to mobilize the vote, focusing initially on encouraging young people to register to vote. As in the US, the main impetus for this drive was online, in particular through social networks. During the four weeks of the campaign many commentators saw the surge in support for the Liberal Democrats as being driven by young voters, desperate for change from the old two-party system. Social media were the key to influencing this group, and each party set up FaceBook groups, Twitter accounts and posted promotional material onto Youtube.

In Wales there were something like 150,000 registered students who, if all eligible to vote, would have formed around 7% of the total electorate, concentrated in several key marginal constituencies. Their influence could be decisive, except of course there were nowhere near that number of eligible student voters: a very large number would have been overseas students, and another significant proportion would not have registered to vote in their student accommodation, despite the social media campaigns.

Indeed, looking at Wales as a whole, in those seats where there were universities, voter turnout was lower than average, increasing around 1% compared to a national increase of 2%. Once again, Labour and the Conservatives seemed to achieve identical shares of the vote in university towns and cities as they did in Wales as a whole. Votes for the Liberal Democrats were just 1% higher than the national average, and those for Plaid Cymru about 1% lower. These figures are hardly evidence of any massive surge of student voters to the polls.

Looking at individual constituencies can be instructive.

In Cardiff Central there would potentially be as many as 40,000 students eligible to vote, from Cardiff University and UWIC. This bloc would dominate the constituency, but of course was never so significant for reasons explained above, and because many students would have been living in outlying places. Cardiff Central superficially seemed to bear out the Liberal Democrat illusory surge as it was retained by the party's MP. In practice, though, the voter turnout did not change, and the Liberal lost over 8% of their 2005 vote, most of it to the Conservatives who increased their vote by over 12%.

In Swansea West there was another potential political upset with the Liberal Democrats threatening the sitting Labour MP. This was a comparatively marginal seat and one where the Liberals put a good deal of resource into developing the student vote through social media. Between them Swansea University and Swansea Metropolitan University could claim to have 24,000 students on campus, but in practice voter turnout increased only very slightly and below the average for Wales as a whole. In practice the Labour vote did crumble, but not enough to unseat the MP: but the Conservatives benefited from this as much as the Liberal Democrats, both of whom added around 4% to their vote.

Pontypridd saw a surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, which might in part have been attributable to the use of social media amongst the 21,000 students at the University of Glamorgan. The same caveats about overseas students and voter registration have to be noted, though, particularly as a proportion of the campus has relocated to central Cardiff. Indeed, there was no rush of new voters in Pontypridd – voter turnout actually declined in 2010, compared to a national increase of 2% or so. And while the Liberals increased their votes by 11% here, the Conservatives rose by 4%, and the main story was the relative collapse of the Labour vote.


The Arfon constituency was one where there was a genuine change of representation, as the seat was taken from Labour by Plaid Cymru. Were the 16,600 students in Bangor University responsible for this change? It is possible, as there was an above-average increase in voter turnout of 5%. But unusually this surge appeared to favour Plaid, as the Liberals lost 2% of their vote compared to a national increase of the same order. Labour also lost votes, but not as badly as elsewhere in Wales, and the Conservative vote stayed unchanged. Arfon, therefore, seemed to buck all of the national trends, electing a new Plaid Cymru MP when in the rest of the the country it lost votes.

Did the 12,000 students at Aberystwyth help to boost the sitting Liberal Democrat's vote by nearly 14%, way above the national average? It is possible, but it is important to note that voter turnout actually fell, by over 3%, one of the larger drops in Wales. So no apparent surge of new voters. The Conservatives lost votes: although the drop was small, it has to be set against a national increase of nearly 5%. And although Labour dropped votes too, they did less badly in Ceredigion than elsewhere in Wales. It is possible, therefore, that the student vote did help the Liberals in Ceredigion, but given the overall decline in voting this conclusion is far from certain.

Carmarthen East too might have benefited from the 12,000 students at Lampeter and Trinity, but here again the picture was mixed. All of the main parties did slightly better than average here, except for Plaid Cymru which lost over 10% of its vote (but retained the seat). There was a similarly mixed picture in Newport West where the local university's 9,000 students might conceivably have influenced the vote: here though, Labour and Plaid did better than their showing elsewhere in Wales, while the Conservatives and Liberals did worse, this on an above average increase in turnout. Wrexham's votes rose in line with the national picture: Glyn Dŵr University's 8,000 students did not appear to have influenced the result, where the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru were the main beneficiaries, while the Liberal Democrats rose in line with the increase in Wales as a whole and Labour underperformed, losing 9% of its votes, but retaining the seat.

In summary, therefore, no apparent surge of new student voters were in evidence in Wales. The impressive rises in the Liberal Democrats' votes in Ceredigion and Pontypridd may have had nothing to do with the student population as in these places voter turnout actually decreased. And the one place with the most significant student population, Cardiff Central, actually saw the Liberal Democrat vote drop sharply, with the Conservatives appearing to benefit the most. This was not what we had been led to believe would happen with the much vaunted Liberal surge.

In practice all of the main parties were using social media, but as we have noted in an earlier blog, the traffic was by no means one way. 'National Not Voting Conservative Day' on Facebook got support from 178,000 people, but was rejected by over 210,000 with a further 250,000 uncommitted. The official Conservative Party group on Facebook had 100,000 supporters on election day, more than the Liberal Democrats and almost twice the number that Labour had gathered. The Conservatives learned from the European Elections when we saw how they were able to co-opt the status updates of their supporters. They uploaded two dozen well-produced videos to WebCameron on YouTube: although much derided, some of these were viewed 180,000 times in a matter of days (for example 'This is a historic election', although viewing figures for some others were in the tens of thousands. We found that in Wales the Liberal Democrats seemed to focus on the use of emails (something that missed the mark with student voters) while younger Plaid Cymru candidates experimented with video blogs and used the multimedia capabilities of their smartphones effectively.

What seemed to have happened was that there was a general sense by the parties that they had to ride the new media wave in the way that Barack Obama had done (although many post 2008 studies have shown that the so-called voter surge there seems to have been over-hyped). But what politicians in the UK failed to do was to translate enthusiasm into action on the ground. US Democrats used social media to encourage voters to register by telling them where and when. They used the same channels in a major way to raise funds to support the campaign, something British parties steered away from. Most importantly the US Democrats linked virtual supporters to real campaigning events and local activists, channelling the latent interest into old-fashioned canvassing and providing the real evidence on the ground of what was suggesting itself online and in opinion polls. In the end the social media campaign kept itself to the virtual world: as our figures suggest, there was no surge in student voting in Wales. In the end the parties that brought in the vote had canvassers on the ground, and local party machines to get out the leaflets and put up the posters. In the end it was good old-fashioned politics which won.



13 May 2010



The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the 2009 European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.

Thursday 13 May 2010

Partisan chants in a virtual world

So far in these blogs we have considered social media in the context of a channel of communication. In traditional thinking the politicians and their parties would use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms to send their messages out to an audience. This would passively receive the message as any other medium, broadcast or print. In this digital election, though, all of that changed: social media became the aggregators of information, and the data itself part of the social glue that formed and bound communities of knowledge.

What this meant in practical terms was that items from the political news became the things by which we came to understand our own views and to articulate them to others in our social network. In this arrangement, audiences themselves became broadcasters, and increasingly the traditional broadcasters turned to social media to learn what was being said. The BBC in particular had recourse to Twitter in each of the high profile Leaders' Debates, identifying the key 'trending topics' as a way of gauging the extent to which the ideas on the TV had migrated to the screens of PC, laptop and mobile phone.

What hundreds of thousands of us seemed to be doing during the UK General Election was unconsciously replicating what teenagers have been doing since the advent of instant messaging services such as MSN and Yahoo! Messenger: we were consuming broadcast media while at the same time engaging in web-enabled social media. So through Facebook, YouTube, Myspace and Twitter we publicly laughed, cheered, yawned cried, booed and scowled ourselves into an understanding of what we were witnessing. The election was social learning in action. But while teenagers had been watching old episodes of Friends or repeats of Scrubs, their older siblings and parents were hooked into live news, party election broadcasts and political debates.

In this 2010 election the print media, for the first time, became largely marginalised in the process of opinion forming due to the advent of social media. While in 2005 we might have had to wait until the next morning to read how we should be evaluating the previous evening's news, in 2010 we had our social network on hand with their verdict. There were around 26 million UK voters active on Facebook, commenting, sharing links, supporting causes and generally airing their views. It might be thought that this process was a progressive one, but in fact it was mixed: a movement on Facebook called 'National Not Voting Conservative Day' was supported by around 178,000 people, but rejected by over 210,000 with a further 250,000 uncommitted. Social media provided voters with a range of tools with which to express their views and beliefs, but it is simply not true to say that these exclusively favoured Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the minor parties. Indeed the official Conservative Party group on Facebook had 100,000 supporters on election day, more than the Liberal Democrats and almost twice the number that Labour had gathered.

Once again it would be tempting to say that broadcast journalism had filled the gap left by print medium, and it is commonplace to hear it said that the Leaders' Debates were the 'game changer' in 2010. Once again, though, social media played a huge part in this, with many more voters consuming the debates vicariously through social networks and deciding on the basis of pictures, comments and movie clips who had won the argument. In our study we found the parliamentary candidates engrossed by the debates with some adding their views on Twitter every few minutes. Attempts by the old media to call the debates for one candidate or the other were invariably met with derision online, particularly if the verdict failed to correspond to the new 'world view' articulated by one's social network.

Broadcast media in 2010 continued to provide the headlines and narrative content on which social networks thrived. Key topics of conversation included incidents when candidates were found to be seriously off-message, for example in describing immigrants or homosexuals. But the process went further, and continued to disrupt existing journalist-audience relationships: in some cases audiences themselves judged what should and should not be reported, and insisted that the broadcast media complied. A telling example of this was the demand that they report on the views of Philippa Stroud, a Conservative candidate in Sutton, who allegedly held some unusual views on homosexuality: for almost two days as the campaign came to a climax the term #PhilippaStroud was the leading 'trending topic' on Twitter in the UK (ie the most talked about theme on the platform at the time). This fact in itself forced its way into the broadcast media and the story did find its way onto the BBC (Stroud, described as a Conservative high-flyer failed to capture the seat from the Liberal Democrats).

This incident serves to highlight another important aspect of the campaign and the role of broadcast media in it. News stories, rumour and gossip were surfacing continually during the campaign and in the aftermath, far more than journalists were able to get into their short TV or radio bulletins. Most of the better-known political correspondents and journalists supplemented their public offerings with extensive behind-the-scenes commentary on blogs, live online news feeds and Twitter posts. Channel 4 Neews's Jon Snow and the BBC's Nick Robinson had around 12,000 people following them on Twitter, while Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC had managed to gather 20,000. This gave audiences, candidates, party workers and others privileged access to information that never made it to the airwaves, or knowledge to share in advance to it being broadcast. This has been particularly the case during the post-election days when speculation surrounded the coalition talks taking place between Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour. Here it was not just that the print media was sidelined by events, but broadcast itself was being undermined by social media.

The final part of this new picture emerges from the other novel aspect of social media, the ability of audiences to talk back. We have alluded to the way in which aspects of the campaign ignored by the media were forced to their attention, as well as the way that audiences co-created new media phenomena such as the catchphrase “I agree with Nick”. In the immediate aftermath of the election, when there was a hiatus of several days as coalition deals were talked about, social media were mobilised by ordinary voters, party workers and politicians of all shades to encourage the negotiators to adopt particular courses of action. Once again the evidence of this could be seen in the trending topics on Twitter, where #dontdoitnick was aired constantly over several days.

The chorus continued after the deals were done, with audiences using the same channels that politicians had used to talk to them, to talk back. We noted several parliamentary candidates from our study being far more vocal on Twitter after the election than when the campaign was running. In one case a Liberal Democrat had a running argument about principles and betrayal with a former Green candidate, the row stretching over nearly two days. In this period social media were once again deployed with Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party all targeting disaffected Liberal Democrats via social media. No doubt other parties were similarly targeting disaffected Conservatives. Ironically, the loud dissenting voices in the Liberal and Conservative ranks were probably of great value to the party negotiators, each one able to show evidence to the other party the extent to which their tentative agreements were straining the loyalty of their party members.

Overall the larger picture of the new media environment in the 2010 election is confused. There was a blurring of boundaries between the web, broadcast and print media, with each platform involved in producing output for the other. Similarly, it was not always clear in social media who was the audience and who was the communicator. The dynamics of social communication meant that audiences became aggregators – usually uncritical echo chambers for messages and narratives that chimed with their world view. In an important sense we all became journalists or broadcasters, with social media empowering us to get our views across to a wider audience. As audiences we expected to be consulted, and broadcasters often obliged, faithfully reporting the reaction of what they called 'The Blogosphere'.

It has already been mentioned that the Leaders' Debates were said to be the 'game-changer' in 2010: this may be true in more ways than one. What we observed happening was that audiences were consuming the debates and their aftermath in a teenager fashion, establishing their viewpoints before, during and after by reference to their peer groups and other opinion leaders online. This process continued right up to and past polling day. As the results started to come in on the night of June 6th, large numbers of us stayed connected synchronously via FaceBook chat, IM and Twitter, digesting the implications of the unfolding drama into the early hours, by reference to others. In an important way what the Leaders' Debates did was to provide material, not to persuade us one way or another, but to take away and discuss in our small online huddles.

In a similar way, our earlier blogs about the extent to which Twitter delivered the vote can be said to have missed the point. What Twitter and other social media provided us with was a collection of ideas to kick around: but while the candidates may have thought that these messages were persuasive, in practice audiences took the ideas, talked about them and ultimately accepted or rejected them. In practice we believe that social media were generally effective in helping uncommitted voters to find a party or candidate to support. What was often lacking was a persuasive call to action: the virtual world delivered a virtual supporter that in many cases never made it to the polling station.

Finally, it is worth being clear that we are not suggesting that Twitter and other social media are now somehow a substitute for serious journalism. Twitter may have become part of the news, but there was little argument, reasoning and debate in evidence during and after the General Election (there is a limit to what can be argued in 140 characters anyway). Instead it often became an aggregator or echo chamber for the same partisan chants, forcing itself onto our attention through sheer volume or persistence. Ordinary voters, having been handed a microphone, were reluctant to return it after they had had their say. The short messages we received helped to reinforce our views, while the process of re-broadcasting them had an evangelising effect on many.

It is ironic that when the internet gives us almost instant access to information resources with which to check our facts, the immediacy of social media often means that we suspend our critical faculties and join in the chanting with the rest of our virtual tribe. An example of this was a posting from The Centre for Women & Democracy when the new regime was starting to allocate seats in government 12 May. The message gave comparative figures of the extent to which women were represented in cabinet in the EU “Spain 53% Germany 37% France 33% Neth 33% Italy 27% Greece 26% Belg 23% Ptgl 13% UK so far 0%”. This statement may have been true when it was posted early in the morning, but in the space of a few hours it had been rebroadcast uncritically at least 600 times, probably many times that number where Twitter users removed the @CWD attribution. Indeed it was still circulating widely, unamended, as an admittedly small number of women were appointed to the British cabinet, and and even the following day. Chanting is no substitute for journalism, and providing audiences with access to the real information does not alter the facts that many of us prefer to rely on our friends and relations.


13 May 2010



The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the 2009 European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.

Wednesday 12 May 2010

What Makes for Good Twitter Traffic?



We studied all of the Twitter traffic from parliamentary candidates in Wales in the 2010 General Election. We also looked at the metrics associated with their Twitter accounts (how many people they followed, how many people were following them) and roughly scored their performance to identify the people who were making most effective use of the medium. It was interesting to find that the qualitative analysis (our subjective analysis) corresponded reasonably well with the crude quantitative scoring.

Of the candidates in Wales, perhaps only a dozen seemed to really understand the medium. Of these René Kinzett (Swansea West) was the most engaged, but there were also strong performances from Heledd Fychan (Montgomery), Matt Smith (Blaenau Gwent) and John Dixon (Cardiff North). As we noted in an earlier blog, successful Twittering did not always translate into an increased share of the vote – something which affected Dixon as well as Caryl Wyn Jones in Vale of Clwyd and Chris Bryant in Rhondda. However, Merthyr's Amy Kitcher performed extremely well in the votes and ran an exemplary Twitter campaign. But as one candidate reminded us, “Twitter was fun: the real campaign was elsewhere”.

So what made for a successful Twitter campaign? The critical success factors, we argue, can be summed up under the acronym SPREAD. This stands for 1) storytelling; 2) personality; 3) rich content; 4) excitement; 5) added value; 6) dialogue.

Twitter is a social medium, and as with all forms of interpersonal communication storytelling plays a central role. Celebrities such as Stephen Fry have shown how the public will take to an extended narrative, even when the content at times appears mundane. Similarly, Sarah Brown, wife of the outgoing Prime Minster, had over a million people following her on Twitter (which is roughly five times the number of registered Labour Party members at the time of the election). Welsh candidates went out campaigning, of course, and they got stuck in traffic jams, bought fish and chips, took their dogs to the vet, missed Doctor Who on TV having forgotten to set the video recorder, had to explain to their grandmothers what a videoblog was – in short, lived ordinary lives. Successful Tweeters told the story of the campaign on a daily basis and highlighted the many episodes that touched them, made them laugh, angered them. They watched the Leaders' Debates on TV and shared their opinions. Their narratives, like soap operas, were both mundane and compelling. It made them human.

Related to this is the aspect of personality, as conveyed by social media. The conversations and dialogues enabled followers to get a sense of the politicians as people. The younger Plaid Cymru candidates were often forthright in their views: one said how she would not trust a Tory as far as she could throw one, and others were similarly (and ironically) disrespectful of their opponents. This aspect led to party embarrassment outside Wales where during the campaign both Labour and Conservative parties were forced to suspend candidates after they posted off-message comments on their Twitter pages.

Effective management of Twitter included the use of rich content, something which younger candidates with smartphones took to well. The most obvious example was the use of photographs taken during campaigning and uploaded contemporaneously. These pictures were not just used gratuitously, though: the more effective ones told a story or entertained their audience. One Plaid Cymru candidate uploaded a picture of what she described as Lib Dem sheep, due to the large yellow markings on their backs. The same person posted a closeup of her face to highlight her crooked fringe – with a wry comment that this might be what a balanced parliament looks like. Candidates used video blogs, podcasts and other multimedia devices effectively, as well as more mundanely using Twitter to link to relevant websites and news reports.

Twitter also allowed candidates to communicate the excitement and energy of the campaign by drawing attention to their busy schedules. Typically they were campaigning 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week – or at least Twitter enabled them to give that impression. Live Tweets during key points in the campaign such as the Leaders' Debates and during controversies such as Brown's bigotgate embarrassment added to the sense that history was being made and that the candidates were sharing this with their audience.

As with storytelling, Twitter was used well by some candidates to add value to the campaign. There were three ways they did this, as follows: 1) by the immediacy of the way they reported the events (and here mobile devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone came into their own), with the Twitter feed acting something like rolling news; 2) providing advanced notice of future events (meetings, hustings, debates, etc.); 3) supplying privileged insights into the campaign based on inside sources (something existing MPs were unashamed about, particularly those that had access to government ministers).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, Twitter enabled dialogue to take place. The most successful Tweeters engaged in debate, answered questions, posed questions of their own. Most candidates, though, were woeful in this respect. Their Twitter traffic, to the casual reader, would have showed their interest as being one way – talking TO an audience in the way a politician in the previous generation would have done with a microphone and loudspeaker. We randomly questioned candidates during the campaign, or commented on aspects of it: hardly any took the trouble to reply. Similarly, we 'followed' every candidate in Wales that was on Twitter: of these just 2-3 were interested enough to 'follow' us back. Social media is about conversations rather than dialogues: many candidates were skilled talkers but had not grasped the idea that Twitter enabled them to connect with voters, journalists, party activists, political opponents and other key stakeholders.


Comment on methods

In order crudely to quantify successful and unsuccessful Twitter activity we took three key measures during the General Election campaign: firstly the number of followers each candidate had; secondly the number of people following them; and thirdly the number of postings or Tweets made by the candidate. We assigned a numerical value to each criterion, ranging from 10 for the most active, 1 for the least active and zero if there was no activity at all. So for example someone with the most Tweets posted would score 10 on that scale, but might only score 2 if their audience was demonstrably small. We therefore had three measures as follows: 'Listeners' had high scores for the amount they posted and scored well if they were following a larger than average number of other Twitter users; 'Talkers' by contrast used the medium a good deal, and had comparatively large audiences; finally 'Engagers' had high scores for listening and for talking combined.

It can be seen that a candidate could achieve a score of 100 for talking, 100 for listening and therefore a maximum 200 overall for 'engagement' (which combined both scores). In our study two candiates, René Kinzett and Heledd Fechan scored maximum points. In practice we found that most heavy 'talkers' also tended to score strongly on 'listening'. There were a few exceptions, though, but the methodology enabled us to exclude candidates such as Lembitt Opik in Montgomery who seemed to give up on Twitter during the campaign despite having a very large 'following'. It also meant that candidates who were extremely vocal on Twitter but who had only a small audience were similarly downgraded in our scores.

Interestingly, the crude data scoring produced a ranking which broadly corresponded with the subjective (qualitative) analysis of the content of the campaign: the same candidates emerged from this as effective communicators as were highlighted by the scoring system.


Evolving Twitter protocols: the future

Already the exponential growth in iPhone and smartphone ownership is starting to change social media. For Twitter the mobile device is ideal, enabling users to post rich content in real time, to engage in dialogues (albeit in 140 characters) and to tell stories without having to be tied to a fixed broadband. Users are already doing this, and increasingly social media conversations here and on Facebook are being mediated through multimedia content.

It was encouraging that we came across no real evidence of party interference in their candidates' Tweets (although some were rather predictably partisan). One widely recognized requirement for social media is that messages should not attempt to sell or persuade, at least not overtly; social media instead needs to engage through the authenticity and spontaneity of the message.


12 May 2010



The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the 2009 European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Twitter: the real campaign was elsewhere


What impact did Twitter have on the election in Wales? Overall, probably very little: less than a quarter of the candidates were registered on Twitter, and many of these were either casual users or failed to Tweet at all. However, for individuals the picture is more encouraging: active Tweeters performed significantly better than non-users or casual users. And when we look at each party's overall performance, active Twitter users tended to outperform their party colleagues (although there are individual exceptions, of course).

It would be tempting to look at the crude voting data and decide that Twitter had delivered the vote. In Wales Twitter users were well represented in the results: of the 10 candidates who showed the largest increase in the share of their vote, 5 were Twitter users, more than double what we would expect to see. 13 successfully elected MPs were on Twitter, while Lembit Opik lost his Montgomery seat, having not used his Twitter account at all during the campaign. This analysis would be misleading, though. In the case of Opik, he lost to a well organized Conservative campaign that did not use Twitter either. Eight of the newly elected MPs on Twitter actually performed worse than average for Wales. Furthermore, of the ten candidates who lost the largest share of votes in Wales, 5 were Twitter users.

What we can see is that more engaged Twitter users were significantly better represented in the voting figures than casual users: 14 active Tweeters performed better than average, compared to 8 who performed worse in terms of increasing their vote. However, this overall analysis is skewed by the much wider picture of what was happening to the parties on a national and regional scale. Instead, it may be more helpful to examine the possible impact of Twitter within each party, thereby enabling us to allow for any 'bounce' caused by events such as the Leaders' Debates and the progress of the campaign as a whole.

As we noted in an earlier blog, the Conservatives seemed lukewarm about Twitter, with less than a quarter of their candidates signing up for it. Prior to the formal Election campaign starting, there were indications from Conservative headquarters that the messages going out on Twitter would be tightly controlled, but we saw no real evidence of this. Most of the traffic seemed to be fairly spontaneous and authentic. Rene Kinzett (Swansea West) posted more messages than any other candidate during the campaign, a mixture of views, links, news and debate, and was without a doubt the most active candidate from any party using the medium. As a result he was able to build up an audience of over 800 by voting day, more than any other candidate apart from sitting MPs. In Delyn the Conservative candidate Antoinette Sandbach engaged well with the constituency, as did David Jones who was defending Clwyd West for the party.

In Wales, though, the Conservatives performed less well than nationally, increasing their share of the vote by just two percentage points, against a national rise of 3.8%. Their candidates' more successful Tweeters all performed above average except Matt Wright in the Vale of Clwyd, whose vote only rose by 3.5%. Their star performers on election night (Glyn Davies who took Montgomery from the Liberals and Karen Robson who came close in Cardiff Central) did not use Twitter. Neither did Simon Hart who won Carmarthen West from Labour. Anthony Ridge-Newman, though, increased his vote in Ynys Mon with an active Twitter campaign as part of his election armoury.

The Green Party's national vote held constant, something reflected in Wales where there was no noticeable change. The party fielded 13 candidates, of whom only 3 used Twitter. Their most competent user was Sam Coates in Cardiff Central who performed above average. The two other users were less engaged than other candidates in Wales using the medium, and also performed worse than the Welsh average for the party, actually losing votes.

Just one third of Labour's candidates in the election were signed up to Twitter. The most active users were three sitting Members, Chris Bryant (Rhondda), Julie Morgan (Cardiff North) and Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West). Only Bryant made it into the overall Wales top ten, though, with a mixture of news, view, pictures and chat. However, Bryant lost nearly 13% of his vote which was one of the worst showings across Wales as a whole. Five other Labour MP were represented on Twitter, but their efforts and those of other party candidates were less noteworthy. Several candidates failed to use their Twitter accounts at all, including Merthyr MP Dai Havard, who performed even worse than Bryant, as did token Twitter user Owen Smith in Pontypridd.

Nationally Labour lost 6.2% of its votes, although in Wales the position was slightly better with a decline of 5.8%. One of the party's most active Tweeters (Julie Morgan in Cardiff) lost her seat to the Conservatives, but actually did less badly in share of the vote terms than most of her colleagues. The same is true of Kevin Brennan (who kept his seat in Cardiff West). Indeed, Nick Smith (Blaeneau Gwent), Madelaine Moon (Bridgend) and Richard Boudier (Ynys Mon) who were all active Tweeters (albeit is a modest way), bucked the national trend and increased their share of the vote (in Smith's case by over 20%). And only 2 of the 20 under-performing Labour candidates used Twitter, and one of these in a minor way. Following the election, Labour had 26 MPs in Wales, but only 8 of these were using Twitter actively.

The Welsh Liberal Democrats also had a comparatively strong presence in Twitter with a third of their candidates registered to use it. Three of these featured in our top ten for Wales, including Matt Smith (Blaenau Gwent), John Dixon (Cardiff North) and Amy Kitcher (Merthyr). Once again, though, there were variations: 3 of the Liberals' nominal Tweeters didn't use the medium at all during the campaign – including, surprisingly, MP Lembit Opik who had the advantage of a very large audience already built up. Once again, the Liberal Democrats used Twitter to build an element of urgency and excitement into their campaigns, highlighting local issues and events that were happening on the ground.

It could be said that Twitter for the Liberals was a case of missed opportunities: MP Opik lost his seat, while Jenny Willott in Cardiff Central (not a Twitter user) lost nearly 9% of her votes – these two MPs representing the worst performing Liberal candidates in Wales in 2010. Twitter is by no means all the answer, though: only 3 of the top performing Liberal candidate were active users, while John Dixon's skill with Twitter in Cardiff North merely resulted in a below-par result, a minor drop in his vote. Nationally the Liberal Democrats increased their share by 1%: in Wales, though, they did better, achieving a rise of double that figure.

Of the parties, the most active was Plaid Cymru, where over half of the candidates were using Twitter. Of these we assessed four to be in the top ten users in Wales during the campaign. These were Heledd Fychan (Montgomery), Caryl Wyn Jones (Vale of Clwyd), Ian Johnson (Vale of Glamorgan) and Myfanwy Davies (Llanelli). However, the picture is confusing as Wyn Jones under-performed the party as a whole when it came to getting the vote. The same was true of another active Twitter user, Jonathan Edwards in Carmarthen East, who dropped 11% against a 1% drop for the party as a whole. Similarly, the large number of Plaid users can be misleading: four of their candidates had Twitter accounts but didn't use them at all during the campaign, and a similar number were only occasional users. Fychan and Jones were both very effective communicators, using a mixture of comment, pictures, videos and cross links to other web pages: but while the former added votes to her tally in Montgomery, the latter lost support (in both cases, it has to be said, in the 1-2% range. The active Plaid users engaged with their audience, answering questions and taking part in debate.

Independent candidates in Wales increased their share of the vote by 2%. Only two candidates used the medium: George Burke in Cardiff South was highly engaged, but performed less well than the average for Independents in Wales; Dave Rees in Islwyn, by contrast, spent very little time on Twitter, but increased his share of the vote by over 4%. Similarly, UKIP which contested all Welsh seats increased its share of the vote above the UK national average, when there was virtually no usage of Twitter. Likewise, the Christian Party which fielded 8 candidates in Wales performed exactly in line with other party showings in the UK as a whole – holding their vote. No candidates from the Christians used Twitter in Wales.

Conclusions

Active Twitter users in Wales tended to perform better in terms of the final vote than non-users or light users. This is not to say that the rises were due exclusively to Twitter – as one candidate told us “Twitter was fun: the real campaign was elsewhere”. Voting was affected by macro issues from the national campaign such as the Leaders' Debates, the so-called bigotgate, controversies over off-message comments by various candidates, etc. But in many of these cases Twitter contributed as commentators and ordinary voters took to the medium to air their views. This is still very much the case during the current negotiations about forming a government. In other words Twitter's influence on a range of audiences was probably greater than the crude voting figures give credit for.

Far from being condemned as ineffective and faddish, these results suggest that Twitter is a medium whose potential has yet to be realized. Many candidates (particularly the younger ones) were starting to experiment with ways to use Twitter through their iPhone, getting across with images and text the immediacy of the campaign on the ground. This was something that was not in evidence at all a year ago during the elections to the European Parliament. The seemingly unstoppable rise in the sales of smartphones is already changing the dynamics of communication with social media conversations increasingly moving from fixed machines and laptops to mobile devices. At the same time, social media conversations are evolving from text-based posts to multimedia offerings – almost all of this driven by iPhone ownership. Twitter is already benefiting from this trend, and politicians will need to respond in terms of their ability to react and in choosing the narratives they need to develop.

11 May 2010



The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Senior Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.

Thursday 6 May 2010

Twittering the General Election in Wales 2010

Introduction


Twitter has started coming into its own during 2010, and last month announced that it had passed the total of one hundred million users worldwide. In the run-up to the General Election there were indications from most of the main parties that social media were going to feature strongly in the campaign.

In the event, much has been made of the medium. Candidates have been sacked for making inappropriate postings, and the BBC in particular focused on Twitter when gauging audience reaction to the live Leaders' Debates. Given the interactive nature of the medium, too, it is no surprise to see it being used by the public to highlight issues that were felt to deserve mainstream attention, such as the views of Conservative candidate Philippa Stroud.

The study

We studied the use of Twitter by candidates in the elections a year ago for the European parliament; across Wales we found that the takeup this medium was limited to just a few candidates, who in turn did little to engage with their audiences. This year the medium has been used extensively, by all of the main parties. More importantly it has often been used effectively – to talk and to listen.

There were around 270 candidates standing for election across 40 constituencies in Wales. Of these, over 60 had Twitter feeds. The activity varied enormously: some candidates never used their accounts, while others (such as Rene Kinzett in Swansea and Heledd Fychan in Montgomery) were using the channel several times a day. The active users engaged in Q&A with voters, talked about their families, commented on the news and the TV debates, and generally added a new dimension to the campaign. Typically the active 'Tweeters' had several hundred people following them on Twitter.

Our evaluation of the candidates' use of Twitter went beyond what they were saying and how many people were receiving the messages: we also took into account how many people the candidates were 'following' at the same time – people and organizations whose views the candidates were interested in.

The Parties

Of the parties, the most active is Plaid Cymru, where over half of the candidates were using Twitter. Of these we assessed four to be in the top ten users in Wales during the campaign. These were Heledd Fychan (Montgomery), Caryl Wyn Jones (Vale of Clwyd), Ian Johnson (Vale of Glamorgan) and Myfanwy Davies (Llanelli). The large number of Plaid users can be misleading, though: four of their candidates had Twitter accounts but didn't use them at all during the campaign, and a similar number were only occasional users. Fychan and Jones were both very effective communicators, using a mixture of comment, pictures, videos and cross links to other web pages. The active Plaid users engaged with their audience, answering questions and taking part in debate.

The Welsh Liberal Democrats also had a comparatively strong presence in Twitter with a third of their candidates registered to use it. Three of these featured in our top ten for Wales, including Matt Smith (Blaenau Gwent), John Dixon (Cardiff North) and Amy Kitcher (Merthyr). Once again, though, there were variations: 3 of their nominal Twitterers didn't use the medium at all during the campaign – including, surprisingly, MP Lembit Opik who had the advantage of a very large audience already built up. Once again, the Liberal Democrats used Twitter to build an element of urgency and excitement into their campaigns, highlighting local issues and events that were happening on the ground.

Just one third of Labour's candidates in the election were signed up to Twitter. The most active users were three sitting Members, Chris Bryant (Rhondda), Julie Morgan (Cardiff North) and Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West). Only Bryant made it into the overall Wales top ten, though, with a mixture of news, view, pictures and chat. Five other Labour MP were represented on Twitter, but their efforts and those of other Labour candidates were less noteworthy than what was achieved by Bryant. Several candidates failed to use their Twitter accounts at all, including Merthyr MP Dai Havard.

The Conservatives had a total Twitter star on their books in Wales. Rene Kinzett (Swansea West) posted more messages than any other candidate during the campaign, a mixture of views, links, news and debate. As a result he was able to build up an audience of over 800 by voting day, more than any other candidate apart from sitting MPs. Overall, though, the Conservatives seemed lukewarm about Twitter, with less than a quarter of their candidates signing up for it. Prior to the formal Election campaign starting, there were indications from Conservative headquarters that the messages going out on Twitter would be tightly controlled, but we saw no real evidence of this. Most of the traffic seemed to be fairly spontaneous and authentic. In Delyn the Conservative candidate Antoinette Sandbach engaged well with the constituency, as did David Jones who was defending Clwyd West for the party.

The UK Independence Party fielded candidates in all of the Welsh constituencies, but only one popped up on Twitter, and then only briefly. The British National Party was contesting half of the seats, but none of their candidates appeared to be online in this way. The Greens did have a presence, with three candidates Twittering, as were three independents. Of these, George Burke (Cardiff South & Penarth) seemed to have found his voice.

Across Wales the picture was quite varied. In Wrexham all of the candidates bar one seemed to be using Twitter. This was uncommon, though. There were eight constituencies where there was no Twittering at all, including Torfaen where nine candidates were standing.

The future for Twitter

For those candidates who were successful, what does the future hold? As we have seen, many outgoing MPs have been using Twitter for some time to maintain contact with the voters. In Wales several Assembly members are active in the medium, particularly Bethan Jenkins (Plaid Cymru), Peter Black (Liberal Democrat) and Jonathan Morgan (Conservative). These AMs are able to get across to the voters of Wales just how busy and varied their lives can be. For our future representatives, Twitter represents a new way to engage with democracy – for the whole of the parliament, not just for a few weeks of campaigning.

The study has been carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Senior Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.