Nobody would accuse me of underestimating the importance of online media and digital platforms, but I would never be naive enough to assume that when it comes to political campaigning that national newspapers no longer matter. This seems to be the agreed attack line adopted this morning by Labour.
Everyone from Lord Mandelson to Charlie Wheelan to the Guardian’s Michael White have been on the TV and radio claiming that The Sun’s explosive decision to back the Tories doesn’t matter in today’s internet age with falling newspaper circulations. Even Alistair Campbell who likes to give the pretence of now being a bit more objective, is trying to convice us on his blog that the Sun’s defection could actually be a good thing.
Labour’s Kerry McCarthy showed the naivety of this response with her ridiculous tweet last night that “Labour doesn’t need The Sun. We’ve got Twitter.” As wonderful as Twitter is, it won’t have been read by close to 8 million people this morning, alongside a full-colour pull-out poster helpfully detailing Labour’s failures.
There were some interesting sentiment analysis from the guys at Tweetminster yesterday in response to Brown’s speech, which classed 53% of tweets as positive with 21% negative. The analysis is great to see but I don’t think it tells us anything more than lots of delegates at the Labour Party conference and supporters were on Twitter yesterday afternoon. I don’t think Twitter is significantly Labour supporting, so again McCarthy’s claim of ownership over the platform for Labour is doubly misguided.
The pure online impact of The Sun shouldn’t be underestimated either. This morning it’s launched a Google Adwords campaign (see below) bidding on keywords including ‘Gordon Brown’ and ‘Labour Party’ which state “The Sun endorses The Conservative Party for the next general election.” The paper’s FeelingBlue campaign has already translated onto Twitter within hours.
Ultimately lets not forget the 23 million plus unique users per month to Sun Online. Beyond pure news coverage The Sun’s website will be a key battle ground for seeding video attack ads and virals during the election campaign - following today’s switch it’s a battle which Labour’s online team will struggle to win.
