The internet has moved on a long way since the last general election in 2001, which came amid the dot.com crash and the lack of interest in online marketing that followed.
But it seems that the mainstream political parties have forgotten about internet marketing as part of the campaign mix this year.
It can't be denied that all of the main parties and many of the smaller, single-issue groups do have a sophisticated and comprehensive websites. Conservatives.com is probably the best-designed and most content rich.
But what the parties have forgotten is that people need to find these websites and that most who visit ordinarily are already connected to politics and are likely to have already developed a voting preference for one party or another. The typical Conservative.com visitor is, therefore, unlikely to be an apathetic 20-something, alienated from mainstream political thinking.
There have been two revolutions with online marketing since the last election. One has been pay-for-placement search/contextual advertising and the other is "blogging", online diaries that tend to be full of the latest viral marketing efforts. The political parties needed to have utilised both of these to get anywhere.
Only one of the big three, the Lib Dems, has bothered to spend any sort of budget online. They bought up banner inventory on newspaper websites and invested in some online search marketing, particularly on keywords relating to the Conservative party and its leader, Michael Howard.
The clever thing about using pay for placement advertising with Google (as the Lib Dems have) is that many websites utilise Google's Adsense product that displays contextual advertising (in effect, what is relevant to the content). So an article on the Conservative leader that is featured on Times Online in the past week or so might have contained an ad saying something like, "Michael Howard? The Lib Dems are the Real Alternative".
However, the Lib Dems miss a trick because they forward users to their online donation page, rather than any content proving that voting Conservative could be a mistake. Online donations are important for a political party, but shouldn't they be trying to win votes, especially at a cost per click of as low as 2p.
I've always believed that real politics is local, and given the opportunity to vote for a party that will make a real difference on a minor issue that is personal to the voter, most of the electorate would consent and give the party a chance. I'm a perfect example. I'd be expected to vote Conservative, although now I think I'm pretty evenly split between the three parties, in the true middle ground of politics. However, if a party could promise to give me a good night's sleep by dealing with the people in Hackney who think that its normal to keep dogs permanently outside and barking incessantly through the night, then I'd probably vote for them. Of course, it's probably not of as much importance as the state of the NHS or the immigration figures, but it's important to me and would make a discernable difference in the quality of my life.
Like many of my neighbours, I've moaned about the noise on websites that offer "neighbourhood chats". A good pay for placement campaign on Google would likely pick up the keywords "barking dogs", "bad neighbours" and "nuisance" and could quite easily display a short ad for (for example) Labour saying, "Noisy Dogs? Labour promises to clamp down on Anti-Social Behaviour, click here for more details", and then link me into the relevant part of their website. If I saw that ad, I'd probably vote for them because I'd feel that Labour also care about my little gripes and want to make my life better.
The options are unending. It could easily be "stop people littering outside my house", or "make the traffic lights change at the bottom of my street" or anything as long as there is some policy relevant to the keywords in their manifesto. In addition, if you stick to non-contentious points that are totally non-party political, then you'll probably get the sought-after votes of the undecided and those who are alienated from the traditional, right-left, public-private arguments and are more interested in making their own life just that little bit more bearable.
The only e-communications that I've had from the main parties have been pretty staid efforts. One was an "urgent e-mail" from Michael Howard telling me that immigration is out of control and that hospitals are dirty, another was a pretty dull e-mail from Labour telling me that they love the NHS. As yet, there's nothing from the Lib Dems. They went straight into my "junk" folder, but that had more to do with the party's inability to send an e-mail properly than a reflection on its content. I would have sat up if Michael Howard had told me that Hommerton Hospital (the closest to where I live, and one I've stayed in for a week) had dirty wards and a high proportion of "NHS tourists", but the Tory e-mail just told me about national issues. It isn't hard to run a postcode targeted campaign by e-mail and it could be so much more effective.
However, there are hundreds of "spoof" emails circulating around the net and posted on blogs everywhere. There's a batch that my company, CyberBritain.com, created as an experiment. A few weeks ago we launched a Make Your Own Spoof "Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?" billboard feature where a user can scrawl a supposed thought of the Conservatives, such as "I wish we had stuck with William Hague", and then send it to their friends or post it on their online blog. This feature was then followed by "Are You Drinking What We're Drinking?" version, with "Michael Howard will be the next Prime Minister" being the most popular option. Perhaps taking their cue from us, Channel 4 News is this week putting together its own series of "viral ads"
Now if Labour were clever, they would have latched on to this weeks ago and created their own spoofs, obviously at arms length, and get their supporters and party workers to post them on bulletin boards and blogs across the web. Labour have this week, apparently, hired Zack Exley, a "Cyber Activist" who worked for the failed Presidential candidate, John Kerry. But it's probably too little, too late.
We created a spoof Labour election broadcast game based on a still from the "Tony and Gordon" broadcast. Users are given the opportunity to fill in the speech bubbles and decide what they were really talking about. Tony tends to be saying, "So here's to five more years at No 10," to Gordon, who replies, "Surely you mean months, Tony?"
But bizarrely the most popular version (which has been posted to almost a thousand different blogs) has Tony Blair saying, "I think I need to evacuate my bowels now", and the Chancellor replying, "I wondered what stunk so much!"
I think the scatological references prove that neither the Tories or the Lib Dems were responsible for posting this one over the web, but it's a shame that neither have tried to create their own games which could then be passed on from person to person virally, getting their message out there, reach new voters and be a little fun. It would also cost a hell of a lot less than their poster ads on the billboards that cover our high streets.
Benjamin Cohen is the founder of QuickQuid. He will be writing an occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman in the tech sector
