The annual party conferences are big dates in the diaries of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative politicians and activists from up and down the country, so this year Dominic and I from TweetyHall / FutureGov along with our friends from On Road Media and OPM, decided to book our train tickets, pack our pocket video recorders and join them.
For those of you not familiar with the set up of party conferences in the UK, there are the debates and the speeches that take place in the main conference hall, but there are also hundreds of meetings held by charities, companies and other special interest groups held outside of this, on the fringe, all vying to attract conference delegates through the door. The theme of our series of fringe meetings this year was: “Local, Social, Digital – How can we use innovative approaches to engage citizens in communities and democracy?”
Our first event was held at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Birmingham on Sunday 18th October, where we were joined by speakers Julian Huppert MP, Mark Pack (Lib Dem Voice Editor) and Cllr Daisy Benson (Liberal Democrat group leader on Reading Borough Council). We decided to depart from the usual fringe meeting format of speeches from the front and then questions from the audience – the theme of the series was innovative approaches after all. Instead, we started the meeting with the speakers joining the audience members in group discussions and then feeding back what they had heard to the rest of the room at the end, with Emma Maier from the Local Government Chronicle ably chairing the meeting.
Here is a video clip of discussions about the use of Facebook in politics and government:
And Twitter:
The speakers then shared some of their own experiences, including Mark Pack, who spoke about councils not collecting residents’ e-mail addresses; Cllr Daisy Benson, who shared her experience of using social media to target local residents and Julian Huppert MP, who talked about how Twitter enables you to have a conversation with constituents, but warned of the limitations of thinking that the views of people on Twitter are the views of everyone. You can read more about this meeting on the FutureGov blog post here.
Then a few hours later, many more Liberal Democrat councillors and activists joined us, and social media training guru Nathalie McDermott from On Road Media, to learn about how to use social media more effectively in our Social Media Clinic, running as part of the Liberal Democrat Conference campaign training programme.
The following week, we headed up to Liverpool in the glorious sun on 28th September for our second Local, Social, Digital meeting, this time at the Labour Conference. We were lucky to have secured popular and outspoken MP, Tom Watson, who pleased the crowds with his tales of using the Freedom of Information Act as an opposition politician to run rings around the current government by obtaining information on the content of the Government wine cellar. Tom has been a longstanding champion of the digital cause, including during his time as a minister, and fielded many questions from Labour party activists keen to hear more of his wise words. You can see Tom’s speech on this video:
Mark Ferguson, editor of LabourList, then spoke about his experience of using social media to access real people. He said that the best channels are Facebook and e-mail, because: “You have to fish where the fish are” – i.e. most people do use Facebook and e-mail, but Twitter is used by a smaller segment of people, mainly those with a bigger interest in politics. Cllr Catherine McDonald, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services at Southwark Council shared her experiences of using social media to join in conversations that are already happening in her local area, and of using Twitter. She advised the audience to focus on building up a local following, so that they are not just tweeting away with no one reading their Tweets. You can read more about Local, Social, Digital – Labour here.
Finally, we left London basking in an unseasonal October heatwave, and headed to rainy Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference. Again, a line up of well known speakers attracted the a good number of the party faithful and led to another lively set of discussions about the uses of social media and other innovative tools to engage people:
Rishi Saha, the former Head of Digital at Number 10, told the meeting that whatever you want to do on on the web, someone will have done it before. He recommended that people look at and learn from good examples, such as those profiled on Facebook Studio. He encouraged the those present to cut through cynicism by getting the statistics about the number of local residents in their area using Facebook (which is likely to be high): “We need to dispel the myth that the use of social media is just for young people. It’s not.”
At all three of the fringe meetings, we encountered councillors and activists who were very concerned about the risks that were presented to politicians by letting down their guard on social media, which is unsurprising considering the scare stories that some of us have heard. But Kate Day, Social Media Editor for the Telegraph, told those present that: “Along as you know yourself, you can be a little bit more relaxed than you think you need to be online.” Hopefully a reassuring remark for politicians to hear from a journalist. The politician on the panel, Cllr Andrew Povey, from Surrey County Council, then attracted the most questions from the audience after sharing his experiences of using social media in Surrey (where FutureGov are working on the Future Surrey programme). He spoke of using social media to find out people’s views on local issues, such as the proposed changes to planning legislation.
You can watch the videos of all three speakers from the Conservative meeting on the FutureGov blog here.
The content generated from these meetings shows just how valuable they were – so thank you to all of you who came along and shared your experiences with us at one of these meetings. OPM are helping us capture the best of the learning from these meetings and are now creating a Local, Social, Digital Manifesto so that we can share your experiences to an even wider audience. Watch this space to find out more.
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