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Article on TechCrunch arguing that the mobile address book is the next obvious area to be mined in the interests of social graphings:

I’ve written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We’re seeing more and more apps go “mobile first, web second” these days, and that’s likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

……..

It seems that companies like Apple and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of actual social data with these contact lists. Calls, texts, emails, it’s all right there. Google obviously has tried (and failed) to build a social graph through your email contacts before — but they went about it wrong, and they did so on the desktop. Mobile is the key to this.

I fully understand why every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to monetise the mobilo-socio-location world wants this data, but all the human factors research we have ever seen or done on mobile says it is Personal – and that also means a lot of it is Private. One would have thought after Buzz’s debacle with the email address books the penny would have dropped re using people’s “hidden” social graphs and making them visible.

A mobile address book is even more sensitive than an email one as (i) like email, it’s a far wider social graph than what most people will happily let others see publicly and (ii) it holds phone numbers which are even more “private” than email addresses. As with Buzz, people have phone numbers of people that they would far rather others’ didn’t know about.

As one commentor on the TechCrunch piece wrote (summing up many of the other comments):

“When was the last time the address book saw any innovation?” Well – actually – it was when malware authors discovered they could mine your Outlook address book as targets for spam and viruses, that’s when! And if the mobile “app developers” let iPhones and Androids be compromised in the same manner, people will take their phones and chuck them in the nearest body of water – assuming that the malware hasn’t bricked them, of course!

Keep your bloody hands off of my address book, OK?

It would take just one Buzz type incident to blow any one player’s credibility for good, which of course is why the Telcos have been so careful so far.

Apple has released a new social network around music, called Ping! This post is not to bury it, nor even to praise it, but to understand why they have launched Yet Another Social Network, especially into the crowded space of Music and the resounding cries of “where is Last.fm now” et al….

Giga Om says that Ping! is The Future of Social Commerce:

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Our review of Lala strategy is over here by the way

From MySpace onwards “Social” music has failed to deliver the goods, for a whole host of reasons but primarily its not a big enough “Social Object” to capture enough attention for a full grown sustainable Social Net. Music is a subset of why and how we interact with people, not a reason (in fact, based on some of my friends’ musical tastes its probably a reason to drop people….).

Now, GigaOm is sounding Ping’s praises from the rafters, but whether they were paid to do it or not, I ain’t buying it as the Future of Social Commerce. My hypothesis is that “Social” and “Commerce” are uneasy bedfellows at best.

But Apple are no fools, they will know all this. In fact, I would hypothesize that Apple does not need this to be a sustainable social network. All it needs is for a sufficiently large crew of volunteers to add sufficient folksonomic aggregation data around iTunes to ramp up its purchasing attractiveness some more.

No, the real play here is harnessing this to the iTunes store – this is all about selling more songs, not about being sociable. It’s about getting a Folksonomy going – Folks do the heavy lifting (recommendations etc), Apple gets the economic benefit (aka the loot in extre spending). I await with eager anticipation the use of kickbacks to “influential” super-users.

Think Social Recommendation Engine, not Social Network.

And of course, getting some more behavioural data about YOU never hurts in the Social Network game…

Declaration of Intent?

Today Facebook announced their much pre-heralded Location service, Places. The interesting thing is how they are treating competitors such as FourSquare and Gowalla – are they partnering with them or planning to eat them? TechCrunch:

Representatives from both Gowalla and Foursquare were invited to take the stage at the event to talk about how they plan to leverage Facebook’s new Places API. Both will allow you to check-in and publish the data to your Facebook feed. Your badges and pins from each of those apps will transfer over as well. As we expected, Facebook is playing nice with these guys — and they’re clearly excited to play nicely back given Facebook’s 500 million users.

Yelp and Booyah (maker of MyTown) are also launch partners for this new API. Booyah is actually making a new app called InCrowd build on the Places API. WIth Yelp, you’ll be able to transfer your check-ins both to and from Facebook as well.

Its easy to see why Facebook wants this, and the probable outcome is predictable (recall the wailing when Twitter started to eat its own ecosystem?).

Foursquare and Gowalla are cleft on the horns of a dilemma – collaborate and (maybe) get access to 500m users, but you are then on your large competitor’s platfotm and at their mercy. Defect and you will probably struggle to recruit Facebook customers, unless of course users want independent alternatives (I would, as I’d prefer to keep my data split up among the dataminers, as a first line of defence). But the facebook logo – a pin through the heart of a 4 in a square – may say it all….

But they have clearly taken the Remora option – stick around to get scraps from the big fish, hope you can clamp on, and avoid being eaten.

Watch the body language of the Foursquare and Gowalla people at the announcement (its on the techCrunch link above), they looked somewhat uncomfortable as “guests” at the feast. There is no such thing as a free lunch, unless its you……

Yelp and Booyah are in a different position as they are not direct competitors…..yet.

Pew study of social media users’ views on social media (full report here):

….a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.

Some 85% agreed with the statement:

“In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future.”

Some 14% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

“In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a negative force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future.”

Most of people who participated in the survey were effusive in their praise of the social connectivity already being leveraged globally online. They said humans’ use of the internet’s capabilities for communication — for creating, cultivating, and continuing social relationships — is undeniable. Many enthusiastically cited their personal experiences as examples, and several noted that they had met their spouse through internet-born interaction.

The underlying drivers are seen to be the lowering of the “friction” of communicating – cost, geographical barriers and time required to keep in contact with people.

The drawbacks perceived were….

Among the negatives noted by both groups of respondents: time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in social connection exposes private information; the internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to engender intolerance.

So what’s not to like?

One of the issues with all this is that the survey was done of “experts” and “stakeholders”. Pew says that:

The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes

And if you read that detailed survey methodology (I do this sort of stuff for a living, these things interest me) and the list of famous Soc Med fans questioned, the worry is that the recipients are not neutrals. “By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample” says Pew. I’ll say – read the respondents opinions over here.

Which begs the question of the whole point – never mind the veracity of – the study. It is clearly not useful as research, so what is the aim here? I have no objections to a “Delphi” technique (questioning experts to get their views), but ths isn’t one, as the questions are pre-structured to derive a result, and the approach is not made very clear in the press release.

The worry I have with this sort of “research” is that tech journalists and bloggers will pick up on the press release without looking at how it was done, and if enough of them do that you get a distorted view of the market. Perish the thought that this may, in fact, be the aim (I see that GigaOm wasn’t taken in….)

I was quite intrigued by this piece from the McKinsey Quarterly, as two people whose views I respect were quite negative about it. In essence the piece argues that two insights are key about Social Media. The first is (I abridge):

The power of importance

An effective way for a brand to be useful in the context of social networks is to make people who originate a word-of-mouth conversation seem important within their own social environment. Recognition by peers is a powerful motivator, and brands that allow users to gain it deliver real perceived value. When users publicize that recognition, it translates into word of mouth. Companies can confer this kind of importance—for example, by issuing achievement “badges” that users can post to their Facebook profiles or by deploying leader boards or achievement scores of all types. As Web sites evolve to become increasingly dynamic experiences that let people interact in real time, the value to core users of being recognized for their prominence in a community will only increase.

and the second….

The allure of virtual items

It’s our strong intuition that virtual items play an important role in facilitating virtual word of mouth. This belief, at its core, is based on observing user behavior. While the notion of virtual goods—nonphysical objects used in online communities and games—still puzzles many executives, it’s quite apparent that consumers love them. People acquire or compete for virtual items obsessively on Foursquare, Zynga, and many other sites. It is estimated that virtual goods have become a very real $5 billion industry worldwide.

So why do consumers pay real money for online objects that don’t actually exist? Their motives reinforce our notion that users seek online importance: they purchase virtual goods primarily for self-expression (such as virtual houses or virtual gifts) and for recognition (such as virtual badges for becoming, say, the “mayor” of a bar on Foursquare). These behaviors are too widespread and intense to be fads, and marketers need to recognize them as meaningful. Brands should actively experiment with ways to use virtual goods as catalysts of word-of-mouth media.

And a final thought:

One final recommendation: no gimmicks. Forget dancing monkeys, artificial contests, or stupid tricks; they add no value and waste people’s time. A commitment to being useful in social-media activities means a commitment to creating only high-quality interactions.

So, now having read it, my thoughts are that:

(i) For anybody who is familiar with the Social Media story over the last few years these are hardly “insights” – it is pretty basic stuff, but then the intended audience of this article is mainly large corporate types (the majority of the readers of said Journal) to whom this is all new, rather than the early adopters. It’s aim – and thus language – is to speak of Social Media in the lingua franca of Large Corporations (the piece’s author works for a large media company now – ’nuff said. ….). The TLA’s and Re-Engineering Methodologies are sure to follow now

(ii) To give the author some credit, much of the Early Adopter thinking is about the technical “how” (or even wow!, gee whiz!, etc) rather than the economic “why” or the executive’s “what”. For all that these are not new insights, they are definitely ones that are Following The Money – ie these are major areas that are directly translateable into the business plans that mainstream adoption requires. In that, it does make a refreshing change from the financial otherworldliness of some early day Social Media evangelists

(iii) To an extent this is “The Death of Social Media” as Adriana Lukas puts it – ie it is the end of it as an early adopter experimentation era, a transition from the romance of infinite possibilities to the pragmatism of (very) finite probabilities, the shift from small, sexy startups to large, boring conglomerates, a shift from huge promises to cheese paring profits (and Google too is having another go, by the way.) and very likley its absorption into the Standard Business Processes. (The real end is when the SAP module comes out….)

The risk is that in the corporate rush to Colonise, Taylorize and Strip Mine the Social Media Golden Goose, said Goose is strangled by the corporate’s red tape decks – as the author notes:

Word-of-mouth marketing through social networks could emerge as an important tool in the marketer’s arsenal. That will depend on whether marketers can tame the fundamentally unpredictable and serendipitous nature of word of mouth without losing what makes it so valuable in the first place—its authenticity.

Ah yes….authenticity. Been a bit of a problem so far, that. Still, if one can fool enough of the punters for enough of the time…..

What would I do differently if I were the McKinsey Quarterly?. I would probably reach out to a host of other alumni who are also working in this area to get a richer, more nuanced view.

Like me for example

Article in The Economist on two interesting properties of social networks that taken together allow early prediction of epidemics.

Firstly, your friends on a social network are more likely to be popular than you:

Consider both an avid cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and a grumpy misanthrope, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the “friendship paradox”: the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself.

Secondly, the interesting property of these popular people is that they are more likely to meet sick people before you do:

By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemiologists can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods.

With the result that:

Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler selected a random group of 319 undergraduates and asked each to nominate up to three friends. Using these names, they collected another group of 425 friends. As the friend paradox predicts, the second group were both more popular (named more times by the random group) and more central to the connections among Harvard students. Flu infections were monitored from September 1st 2009 to the end of December by identifying those diagnosed by the university’s health services and by e-mail responses to a twice-weekly health survey. Overall, 8% of the students were formally diagnosed with the flu and 32% were self-diagnosed. But the infection rate peaked two weeks earlier among the group of more-connected friends. Their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner……

…..

As this result came with the benefit of hindsight, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. To do this they went back to the beginning and compared diagnoses between the two groups on a daily basis for each of the 122 days of the study. A significant difference between the two groups was first detectable a full 46 days before visits to health services peaked for the random group. For those with self-reported symptoms, there was a noticeable difference 83 days before the peak in self-reported symptoms.

So there you have it – next Swine Flu Pandemic, start watching your Twitterfriends with loads of followers with ghoulish iattention.

I may even start following Twitterslebs as a rational of Canary in the Mine strategy

Speaking of people with sick friends more popular than oneself, I hear that BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) is very ill. This post is for him, we wish him a very speedy recovery.

Facebook risks leaving the (very large) segment of the market looking for a privacy respecting social network (like we had in, oh, 2006) wide open – NYT:

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

Its not just them – we know of a few startups thinking of how to build “the next Facebook”. And the timing is fairly good. We observed some years ago that the whole market for Social Networks is very early stage, each new one evolving out of the lessons of what worked and didn’t in the last generation. Our analyisis of Social Nets that we did in 2008 said that each one has about 18 – 24 months unchallenged leadership before the next one starts. Facebook has done a bit better than that – probably a sign that the rate of change in the market is declining – but its predictable that new players will start to emerge (We thought Twitter may be it about a year ago, but it turns out that is more a transport infrastructure, although we suspect its architecture will be part of any next generation system).

The main issue facing these new companies is to find a sustainable business model down the line, but for now they have the benefit of starting off on their Freeconomic cushion and disrupting Facebook, which is now coming off its cushion and (seemingly desperately) trying to find real revenue – hence the privacy scraping, which will lead to their demise unless they radically shift strategy.

Update – Benjamin Ellis made a good point in the comments, and I thought it was worth answering on the main page:

The challenge, as we know, is that the utility of any social network is derived from the number of people on it.

Facebook captured the mass audience. A fragmented set of competitors would never have achieved the same thing.

The answer is open standards, but the reality is that open standards for soc.nets. are problematic and a workable model has yet to emerge. It’s going to take a lot to topple Facebook!

In our 2008 analysis they tended to die with a whimper:

(i) The cool people leave (very noisily) to another New New Thing and they suck their followers’ activity away.

(ii) New people join this New Cool Thing, not the Old New Thing – the growth starts to look good, the press picks it up, it becomes sexy, more people move over

(iii) Over time the Old New Thing gets less and less growth, then starts to decline, and this is happening while they are trying to monetise it (typically its been sold by then to someone who actually has to run it as a business, Facebook is too expensive so its IPO or bust) so as cost becomes an issue, there is less and less investment in it so it starts to look tired. The press picks this up and amplifies the un-coolness

(iv) There is often an “over the top” grab for control of the user’s experience by the management which p*sses off the remaining users. Granted Facebook is doing it consistently now already, so its users are being groomed for privacy abuse in a way, but if you look at their history there is nothing to suggest they won’t do something like this as well.

At some point it turns into a ghost town – all the avatars and walls are still there, but there are few new posts and its clear no one lives there anymore apart from a few real diehards who have made small parts of it their own

Facebook’s Privacy Erosion Strategy from Matt McKeon. Shaded areas have gone default public from 2005

Yesterday Matthew Ingram (a normally very sensible chap) wrote an odd article in GigaOm (a normally very sensible blog) essentially arguing that Facebook’s Privacy Erosion strategy (see the chart above from Matt McKeon – the blue shading shows areas that have gone from default private to default public on Facebook between 2005 and 2010) was complicated and not as bad as all that, and even if it is, its ultimately the user’s responsibility. And as for Privacy itself:

That’s complicated in the real world, too — Facebook didn’t invent that, or even pioneer it online. People have been breaching each other’s privacy for decades. Just because Facebook is making some mistakes doesn’t mean it should become the lightning rod for all of our pent-up dissatisfaction with normal human behavior.

I think the chart above tells a different story, better put in an article today in Wired, that Facebook has “Gone Rogue”:

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm wrote a post entitled “The Relationship Between Facebook and Privacy: It’s Really Complicated.”

No, that’s just wrong. The relationship is simple: Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement.

In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users.

Ingram goes onto say, “And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.”

What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don’t’ actually exist? I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot.

I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.

I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

Setting up a decent system for controlling your privacy on a web service shouldn’t be hard. And if multiple blogs are writing posts explaining how to use your privacy system, you can take that as a sign you aren’t treating your users with respect, It means you are coercing them into choices they don’t want using design principles. That’s creepy.

My thoughts exactly – and more to the point, we know why – this is their Business Model. This was my comment on Giga Om:

“Complicated” is not the word I’d use…..”bloody simple” more like. The financial value of any user in a freeconomic service is the net present value of their future spend, and the more Facebook can expose of it to merchants and advertisers and Joe Public etc, the more of their valuation they can justify.

Given that their business model demands continual privacy erosion, and competition is not mitigating this, the only recourse is regulation.

Facebook, as you would expect, is saying users “love the changes” and its just a media conspiracy. Sadly I think what they actually mean is that they count on the bulk of the users just don’t know what’s happening and thus aren’t protesting, and – as always – its a small group who do. But that is the nature of any protest against bad things, it starts small with people who know what is going on. Facebook is risking reaping the whirlwind when their main user base start to pick up the winds of change.

Wired is calling for an Open System alternative, something to play the same role as the Web did vs all the closed OSPs (AOL, CompuServe etc) on the emergent Internet. But my concern, as I note above, is that there is nothing in the Social Media competitive Ecosystem that is likely to make this happen at the moment. In natural Ecosystems, the curators eventually have to shoot large, powerful predatory animals that go rogue before they kill too many of the livestock. In the Internet Ecosystem the only recourse is legal.

And spreading the message so that the sheep at least get out the way.

Voting Irregularities – Votes Cast vs Seats Gained, UK Election 2010

Rory Cellan Jones has written a good starter post re: the impact of Social Media in the UK election – key points of impact he saw are:

Engagement

This was the first election where social networking played a part; although the conversation on Twitter may have been restricted to a few hundred thousand political geeks, there is evidence that younger people in particular used these now-familiar forums to engage with the campaign.

Facebook’s tie-up with the Electoral Commission to promote voter registration also appears to have been a success, with visits to the registration site soaring after links appeared on users’ profiles.

Persuasion

The parties went into the campaign determined to use digital means to reach voters. Both the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, Labour made sophisticated use of Google’s AdSense system to place political messages next to search terms.

On polling day, the Tories went one step further, buying what they described as the best piece of online real estate you can find, the front page of YouTube, to place an advert telling users to vote Conservative.

Huge e-mail databases were used to contact voters time and again throughout the campaign with personalised messages from the likes of Gordon, David and Nick.

Meanwhile, the parties were still spending sizeable amounts on that traditional election tool, the poster campaign – only to find that just about every poster was swiftly amended by online spoofers.

Did any of this make a jot of difference? Hard to say, but that’s also the case with the old media methods.

Organisation

One dull, but important, aspect of the internet election was the way the parties used e-mail, text

One Conservative candidate told me that campaign meetings had been rendered obsolete by the new methods. We watched teams of eager canvassers, some of whom had been recruited via Facebook, fan out across the constituency, led by a very young campaign manager who had studied American methods.

News cycle

For anyone watching the campaign closely, the blogs and social networks – particularly Twitter – provided a fascinating running commentary from an array of mostly partisan viewpoints.

That seemed to make every event, from the TV debates to the “bigoted woman” row, happen at warp speed – so that, after a few hours, it was time to move on to something new.

But did these new media sources actually provide breaking news stories? Apart from the odd Twitter gaffe, not really. Nor did amateur footage shot on mobile phones change the course of the campaign.

I think the #nickcleggsfault riposte on Twitter pretty much stopped the anti-LibDem spin that day. As Rory notes:

So it wasn’t an election won or lost by the internet, but nor was it untouched by the technology. New voters appeared to enjoy their first experience of an election campaign, and will now expect to engage with future elections via the web.

To me though the interesting thing to watch is the evolution of the “First Past the Post” voting system. As you can see by the chart at the top, the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s 3rd biggest party, hit nearly a quarter of the votes cast, and yet only managed to get 9% of the seats. In fact they lost 10% of their seats from the last election despite increasing their share of the vote by 1% point this time.

It is my view that this system will come under huge pressure, and that Social Media will be a major force putting it under pressure, for main 2 reasons:

(i) A lot of the LibDem support are on Social Media systems – their support as massively higher online, and online people make a lot of noise

(ii) It is very clear that online techniques will allow the vote to be distributed far more easily in a more representative way. With these disparities – and also the very major decisions that need to be made going forward – people who are not Tory or labour will demand a voice. Fiascos like people not being able to vote because the voting booths shut at 10pm despite the queues will exacerbate this.

Incidentally, you may see that we noted earlier that the LibDems support online was far greater than the MSM polls were suggesting – and the MSM polls were suggesting far larger LibDem support than turned up – and we wondered (and there was evidence) that Floating Voters were LibDem. There was an the apparent connection between Floating Voters and being Online). It appears however that the LibDem surge vote largely evaporated, which means you can have 3 hypotheses for this online surge:

- Online people are predominantly Liberal Democrat anyway, so you were just seeing existing support.

- There was about a 1% shift in LibDem vote (about 300,000 people) – and that was the impact of the online community voting

- There are many people who talk Socialist and vote Capitalist

There is definitely someything rotten in the social media woodshed here – ie something does not add up. Answers, as they say, on a postcard………………….

Voting Irregularities – Votes Cast vs Seats Gained, UK Election 2010

Rory Cellan Jones has written a good starter post re: the impact of Social Media in the UK election – key points of impact he saw are:

Engagement

This was the first election where social networking played a part; although the conversation on Twitter may have been restricted to a few hundred thousand political geeks, there is evidence that younger people in particular used these now-familiar forums to engage with the campaign.

Facebook’s tie-up with the Electoral Commission to promote voter registration also appears to have been a success, with visits to the registration site soaring after links appeared on users’ profiles.

Persuasion

The parties went into the campaign determined to use digital means to reach voters. Both the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, Labour made sophisticated use of Google’s AdSense system to place political messages next to search terms.

On polling day, the Tories went one step further, buying what they described as the best piece of online real estate you can find, the front page of YouTube, to place an advert telling users to vote Conservative.

Huge e-mail databases were used to contact voters time and again throughout the campaign with personalised messages from the likes of Gordon, David and Nick.

Meanwhile, the parties were still spending sizeable amounts on that traditional election tool, the poster campaign – only to find that just about every poster was swiftly amended by online spoofers.

Did any of this make a jot of difference? Hard to say, but that’s also the case with the old media methods.

Organisation

One dull, but important, aspect of the internet election was the way the parties used e-mail, text

One Conservative candidate told me that campaign meetings had been rendered obsolete by the new methods. We watched teams of eager canvassers, some of whom had been recruited via Facebook, fan out across the constituency, led by a very young campaign manager who had studied American methods.

News cycle

For anyone watching the campaign closely, the blogs and social networks – particularly Twitter – provided a fascinating running commentary from an array of mostly partisan viewpoints.

That seemed to make every event, from the TV debates to the “bigoted woman” row, happen at warp speed – so that, after a few hours, it was time to move on to something new.

But did these new media sources actually provide breaking news stories? Apart from the odd Twitter gaffe, not really. Nor did amateur footage shot on mobile phones change the course of the campaign.

I think the #nickcleggsfault riposte on Twitter pretty much stopped the anti-LibDem spin that day. As Rory notes:

So it wasn’t an election won or lost by the internet, but nor was it untouched by the technology. New voters appeared to enjoy their first experience of an election campaign, and will now expect to engage with future elections via the web.

To me though the interesting thing to watch is the evolution of the “First Past the Post” voting system. As you can see by the chart at the top, the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s 3rd biggest party, hit nearly a quarter of the votes cast, and yet only managed to get 9% of the seats. In fact they lost 10% of their seats from the last election despite increasing their share of the vote by 1% point this time.

It is my view that this system will come under huge pressure, and that Social Media will be a major force putting it under pressure, for main 2 reasons:

(i) A lot of the LibDem support are on Social Media systems – their support as massively higher online, and online people make a lot of noise

(ii) It is very clear that online techniques will allow the vote to be distributed far more easily in a more representative way. With these disparities – and also the very major decisions that need to be made going forward – people who are not Tory or labour will demand a voice. Fiascos like people not being able to vote because the voting booths shut at 10pm despite the queues will exacerbate this.

Incidentally, you may see that we noted earlier that the LibDems support online was far greater than the MSM polls were suggesting – and the MSM polls were suggesting far larger LibDem support than turned up – and we wondered (and there was evidence) that Floating Voters were LibDem. There was an the apparent connection between Floating Voters and being Online). It appears however that the LibDem surge vote largely evaporated, which means you can have 3 hypotheses for this online surge:

- Online people are predominantly Liberal Democrat anyway, so you were just seeing existing support.

- There was about a 1% shift in LibDem vote (about 300,000 people) – and that was the impact of the online community voting

- There are many people who talk Socialist and vote Capitalist

There is definitely someything rotten in the social media woodshed here – ie something does not add up. Answers, as they say, on a postcard………………….