Are the floating voters on Social Media?

There has been a bit of a backlash this week on the use (or lack) of Social Media tools in the current UK election vs what was predicted, and a view that the mainstream media still rules. I'm not sure, and I offer three thoughts:

You see what you measure

The mainstream media is not really monitoring what is going on in social media, or at least is either misunderstanding it or choosing to ignore it. A good example of this is the #nickcleggsfault (see our article here) Twitterstream, which was a response to totally over the top "attack dog" reporting by the (mainly Conservative) MSM journalists attached to the parties. The respected BBC Newsnight program noted that the Twitter campaign forced the MSM to change their tune in hours (as we predicted, in fact) - so the impact was noticed by the BBC - but in the MSM newspapers the next day it was either hardly reported or dismissed as "Lib Dem supporters". It wasn't, it was a general riposte from a lot of the online public at what was felt to be totally OTT and unnecessary party political hackery.

Cognitive Dissoning

The same Newsnight programme made the point about "Blackberry man" vs "iPhone woman". Blackberry man gets emails from his superiors, telling him what to think. iPhone Woman uses the smartphone's social functions to chat to friends and test ideas - and respond in activities like #nickcleggsfault, or spread the word about sites like Count My Vote which tell you at a grassroots level what locals are thinking, rather than what pollsters tell you they are thinking. In other words, its the difference between a Following (Old Skool) and a Community (New Model). This is important, as study after study shows that many people tend to follow what they perceive as the majority opinion. Change the perception of what you think the majority opinion is by allowing people to see what's actually going on for themselves, and you change behaviour and attitudes. (Cf Death Knell for Strong AGW once real data weather emerged)

Which Choir are you preaching to?

The real point is this - of those who vote, about 30% of people will always vote Labour, about 30% will always vote Tory, about 20% will always vote Liberal Democrat. Elections are won, or lost, on who gets the other 20% - the "Floating Voter". These people's impact is massively amplified therefore.

The other thing is the Non Voter - these are latent Floating Voters, and the question is "what is going to get them off their arses"? The same old same old won't do it, so the only way to get new behaviour will be new mediiums

The question for the MSM Party Hacks is this - are their MSM stories getting through to these Floating Voters? I doubt it. As Adam Tinworth on One Man and his Blog notes:

I am a perpetual floating voter. I have political opinions, but no strong party loyalty - and I've voted for all the main parties and some minority ones in the elections I've participated in over the last couple of decades. There's a simple reason for this: I believe that the cut and thrust of discussion is at the root of politics, and the more tribal you are in your politics, the more likely you are to say "Party X must never get into power again", the less likely you are to engage in discussion in a thoughtful, intelligent way.

And this is a rather long-winded way of explaining why I've largely abandoned Twitter during this election campaign. Whereas most of my reading pre-election came from links on Twitter, now most of my stream seems to be filled with tribal posturing and links to "amusing" photoshopping of election posters. It seems to me, well, petty. And not a little childish.

Have I retreated to newspapers? No. The depressing predictability of the tribal voices on our national press has lead to precious little that inspires, informs or educates in them. Instead, I've found myself actively seeking out more intelligent and cogent debate on blogs (including, admittedly, some from national newspaper journalists) and sites specifically dedicated to political discussion like Talk Issues.

Ahem....my theory....

I have a hypothesis - firstly, we know that that the Floating Voter is the independent minded soul who who listens to a range of views and makes their own mind up. Secondly, we know they are swayable by many things but - I would argue - not by the MSM Party Press Megaphone anymore

So where is the floating voter, and who is talking to them, and who are they talking to? Here is my hypothesis - these are the people who participate in #nickcleggsfault, these are the people reading thoughtful blogs and writers, these are the people chatting on their iPhones and other social media vehicles.

I suspect that when the election is over and rational analysis returns, we will find that the MSM totally missed its Floating target, and that the new media was on to it to a far higher extent.

But the MSM Party Hackmachines can't see them because they aren't looking, and even when they do see - out the corner of an eye - they mislabel what's going on.

Must be #nickcleggsfault, of course.

Update - a few people have made the point about the impact of the TV debates being big drivers of change - I'm not disputing this, my point is more that the downplaying of Social Media's impact is because the MSM are discounting who are mainly using it - the floating voters - because they are not measuring it properly. In fact it's quite interesting watching the Twitterstreams during these debates