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Conference speech: Five lessons from MyDavidCameron
Wednesday, 03 February 2010 15:58
By Clifford Singer
On 30 January I spoke at a packed session on "new media and the election" at the Progressive London conference, alongside Alex Smith, Helen Gardner, Sunny Hundal and Andy Newman. There were strong contributions from all my fellow speakers and from the audience. This, more or less, is what I said.
MyDavidCameron is the third of a trio of websites I've set up in the last 18 months which try to do politics a bit differently. The first, Bubblewrapped, was a response to the banking crash, and its entire audience comprised of two economists in Canada.
The second, the Other TaxPayers' Alliance, is still doing a pretty good job of annoying the TaxPayers' Alliance and other neoliberals hiding behind the banner of neutrality. It mixes more serious political commentary with an element of mockery, such as an online generator which supplies journalists with realistic TaxPayers Alliance quotes, because they always say the same thing anyway.
But MyDavidCameron has gone much bigger. In the three weeks since it launched, it's received 160,000 unique visits and, more significantly, its reach has extended beyond the usual politicos into countless discussion forums such as Mumnets, all sorts of football supporters networks, music and clubbing websites, and mainstream entertainment sites like Popbitch.
One way in which MyDavidCameron differs from most political sites (besides the fact that it's funny) is that it has a limited shelf-life. Drag it out too long and it will become the Oasis of viral campaigns. With this in mind I've distilled five lessons learned from creating the site, which may help others launching websites and campaigns.
1. Concept is everything
With a viral campaign concept is everything. It's too easy to get caught up in the technology – how do we use this widget to connect to Facebook or Twitter – and to forget about the basics of having something that's funny or useful or fascinating.
Rather embarrassingly – given that I work in new media – MyDavidCameron is the most lo-tech site I've built for years. Essentially it's a single, static page with lots of images. Even our DIY template required the user to have Photoshop – the clever automatic generators came later, as did online voting.
Since the success of MyBarackObama.com there’s been a tendency to do a kind of Obama-by-numbers. First you're asked to support some kind of online action – maybe a petition to your MP. Then you're taken to another screen asking you to enter 10 friends' names so they can be contacted. Sometimes you're left wondering whether the original action had any significance at all, or whether it was just a convenient hook to harvest more contacts.
It's the online equivalent of the Socialist Worker sellers in your high street who have a different petition for you to fill in each week, when it's just a strategy to sell papers and recruit members.
2. Twitter matters
The second lesson we've learned is that while it's true that Twitter users represent only a small part of our audience, that doesn't make Twitter less important. Why? Because those Twitter users are a gateway to a wider audience.
We launched MyDavidCameron by tweeting about it to our Other TaxPayers' Alliance Twitter account - with a modest 400 followers. But very quickly the number of Twitter hits was overtaken by Facebook, and then Facebook was overtaken by direct visits. In other words those Twitter users had spread the message to Facebook and then both sets of users had spread it to the wider online world via good old fashioned email. Some might even have told others verbally.
And that has remained a consistent pattern. We announce new posters in Twitter and Facebook and that triggers a growth in visitors outside of those platforms. It's essentially what enabled us to contest a £500,000 Tory advertising campaign at zero cost.
3. Crowdsourcing is good
Twitter has also been our main tool for crowdsourcing, and if stating that online collaboration and crowdsourcing are good sounds a little obvious, I should add that it almost didn't happen for us.
Our DIY poster template was very much an afterthought. But it was that that made users engage. People started sending posters to each other. They uploaded them to Twitpic and Flickr, and this created a buzz. And every time we publish a poster, the person who created it tweets and emails their friends to tell them it's up.
Even the automatic generators were crowdsourced. LabourList supplied the first one, but when that crashed under too much bandwidth pressure, other volunteers provided their own. Now the tables have turned. The generators get so much traffic that they send us visitors rather than vice versa.
4. Crowdsourcing is bad
Collaboration and crowdsourcing, however, can also be bad. When we appealed for posters, what we wanted was high-minded satire about deficit reduction. What we got were hundreds of images of Cameron saying, and sometimes doing, unspeakable things. Some were funny, most weren't. And so we abandoned plans to upload them all, in favour of keeping a bit of good old-fashioned editorial control, which is what kept the quality so high.
5. Political satire is difficult
Political satire is a very difficult thing to do well. Even the best-known attempts, from Spitting Image to Mock the Week, tend to be fairly hit-and-miss.
Take the portrayal of Cameron as a toff. It's not so much Cameron's wealth that's the issue as the fact that 17 of his shadow cabinet colleagues are also millionaires, and this in turn relates to a wider problem of the lack of working-class representation in Parliament. And it's not so much Cameron's background that's the problem as whose interests he represents: the rich over the poor.
So that's why we must beware of too many top hats and crass caricatures. We saw how Labour's clumsy attempts to harness this issue backfired during the 2008 Crewe byelection. And although there's now a wider gap between Labour and the Tories on issues of class and inequality, at the time it just looked opportunistic as New Labour was also on record as being – in Peter Mandelson’s words – "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".
And so our line of attack on this issue is to keep it funny but also to try to say a bit more than “Cameron’s a toff”. Some of the posters we’ve featured have done this brilliantly, such as Beau Bo D'Or’s multi-layered "I love the BBC so much I want to cut it up into little pieces and give it to all my friends".
It's also the case that something that works well on a billboard in Hackney - “Fuck off back to Eton” – can end up looking shrill repeated in countless variations on a website. Therefore, far from being the “vicious” attack site painted by some Conservative critics, we’ve pulled our punches when it comes to language and personal abuse.
But we've also had to be careful not to go too far the other way. A few of our posters are funny but not very political at all – such as “Little Boots, actually”. Taken alone, they could strengthen the case made (in very different contexts) by Ian Dale and Paul Richards that the viral campaign helps Cameron by putting him centre-stage. This view is presumably shared by the pro-Tory “Davefacts” website, which puts out ridiculous and sometimes amusing (but always apolitical) statements about Cameron.
Could we fall into the same trap? Perhaps, but only if we got rid of our posters proclaming “Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich”, “Tough on jobs, tough on the causes of jobs”, “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut my taxes but not yours”, and many others. As it is, I think there’s a strong argument that Cameron needs more scrutiny not less, and we should not be overly concerned with the “all publicity is good publicity” argument. Ian Dale’s commentators certainly didn’t agree with his view that the Tory poster campaign had been a success.
The gap
One issue that's emerged is the glaring online gap between the populist satire of MyDavidCameron and those sites with a more politically committed audience, such as Liberal Conspiracy and Socialist Unity. We wanted to ensure that MyDavidCameron included links to more overtly political sites for those who wanted to find out more. But those sites had to be clear and accessible to a relatively mainstream audience, rather than aimed at activists or academics. We had trouble finding any.
This is not an either/or debate: we need sites dedicated to serious political analysis, discussion and theory. But we also need to think much more about how we get our message across to that elusive, wider audience.
This article was originally published at MyDavidCameron.com
