Tweeting for Victory: Bristol Politicians Take Campaigns Online

Where America leads, it has been claimed, the world follows.

It is not surprising

therefore, that as the UK gears up for its most important general

election in a lifetime, politicians from all parties are increasingly

seeking to connect with voters by making use of the range of online

social media tools which proved so crucial in the last Presidential

election in the United States.

In the Bristol West

constitutancy, which includes Redland and Cotham, Labour parliamentary

candidate Paul Smith is an active user of Twitter and has recently

revamped his blog. It is now updated several times a week to

include personal and political themes. In common with most local

politicians, Paul Smith appears to use Twitter for raising awareness of

policy issues and for occasional online micro-debates - especially with

local LibDem Councillor Jon Rogers. The representative for Ashley Ward is active on Twitter, and covers a range of City Council and

national issues via his profile.

Incumbent MP Stephen Williams,

meanwhile, has a web site, which is fairly static in its content, and

has also dipped into the world of video with his own YouTube channel.  As reported on Redland

People at the time, the LibDem MP was the victim of a spoof twitter

campaign last year in which a false profile was created by persons

unknown.

Technologically, the Conservative parliamentary campaign

appears the least developed at the time of writing. Although candidate

Nick Yarker does have a web site, it does not link in with any social

media tools. At the other end of the technological spectrum, however,

Conservative candidate Graham Godwin-Pearson demonstrates his professional background in marketing through his extensive use of social media in his local

election campaign. The Conservative candidate for Redland in the City

Council elections is found on Twitter, Facebook and photo sharing site Flickr. Former

Redland Conservative candidate James Barlow was a pioneer in the

political use of social media locally, the IT consultant and former

soldier remaining active on his Twitter profile.

The Green Party in Bristol West is

claiming that the re-drawn boundaries in the constituency favour their

party and that Bristol West is now effectively a three-way marginal with the

Conservatives relegated to fourth place. Despite this, the party's

social media presence appears focused on the

national scene - and the party's drive to win its first

Parliamentary seat in Brighton Pavilion. Local parliamentary candidate

Ricky Knight does not appear to have a social media presence, a surprise

considering the ability of smaller parties to lever additional

awareness through free social media tools.

Meanwhile, UKIP's candidate

for Bristol West, Bradley Stoke resident Chris Lees, appears alert to

these opportunities, promoting his campaign through his Facebook page, his Twitter profile  (6 followers at the time of writing) and his

personal web site. 

With over 53

million tweets per day worldwide, and Youtube being one of the web's top

search engines, social media and microblogging platforms seem to

represent an increasingly important tool for politicians to connect

locally and raise their profiles among the communities they seek

to represent.

How important these tools will be in influencing actual votes

in the ballot box remains to be seen.