This election is different from 2005  because thanks to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and blogs in general, we (as an electorate) can now take a more personal interest in politics and politicians.  You can follow your local MP on Twitter (find yours here: http://mps.monstermischief.com/) , see what he or she is doing on a daily basis, and even communicate (albeit in a limited manner) with them.   Combine this with an online record of the voting behaviour of MPs (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/), and you have a situation where the ordinary voter can, if they so desire, contemplate the past performance of their MP, liaise with them, and make a very well-informed decision about how to cast their vote on polling day.   

The curious voter can now determine exactly which political party suits them best, by taking the survey on the new “Vote for Policies” website:  www.voteforpolicies.org.uk  Developed for free by a clever bunch of people from Makito Labs and Budcus, this hugely popular website presents policies on a range of issues, leaving you to select the one you like the most, without actually telling you which party each policy relates to.  The results are most intriguing, and the main three parties would do well to pay heed to them.  At the time of writing, based on 90,000 completed surveys, 28.3% of all respondents *should* be voting for the Green Party, the Lib Dems are in second place on 18%, Labour are third with 17%, the Conservatives fourth with 16.2%, while UKIP and the BNP have 10.9% and 9.5% respectively.  Of course this relates purely to the merits of the party policies, but imagine if these trends were reflected on polling day – the Conservatives, currently hot favourites with 39% of the vote (source: Telegraph website), would come a poor fourth, and a Green-Liberal alliance would be the likeliest outcome.  The closest parity is with the Lib Dems, on 16% in the poll, and 18% in the policy stakes, which may suggest that being a newer party, their support is based around individuals who have considered their policies at length, rather than any historical voting patterns or social mobility reasons, which might explain the disparity with the Tories and Labour.  What this website does well is to make you challenge your own preconceptions, and invite you to consider issues on their own merit.  As a tool to encourage abstract thinking it excels – it is simple, clearly designed, and doesn’t try to do too much.  It would be interesting to develop a similar tool for use within government departments, to provide decision-makers with a neutral means of making better-informed choices.  It also highlights the importance of language in presenting ideas.  Some policies are so blunt and lacking in detail as to be off-putting, while others are so wordy and politically correct that they have the same effect.  There is a lesson here not only in content, but in presentation. 

If voters were to base their polling-day decisions on such excellent tools, then we would enter a new era of policy-based voting, which while encouraging people to think about the issues of the day, would sit rather badly with our current First Past The Post system.  Policy-based voting would require a greater number of parties to represent a diverse range of opinions.  The Vote for Policies site currently uses six parties, but we all know that in reality the majority of constituencies in the UK are usually one, two or three-horse races.  A vote for the Green Party in a safe Labour seat may be viewed as being wasted, but it is nonetheless an endorsement of a party and its policies.  With electoral reform on the agenda in the next parliament, it may not be too many years before we can enjoy a system of Proportional Representation, which would accurately reflect the support for the different parties.  For this election, we may see a reduction in so-called “tactical voting”, which seeks to keep a given party out, and a rise in people voting for a party because they approve of their policies.

In the last year the use of social media by government and politicians has increasingly attracted attention in the media. Think of David Cameron's "too many twits" comment or Gordan Brown's YouTube broadcasts. That attention is often negative.

Online opinion is (unsurprisingly) divided into two camps. I've taken two articles (one from The Register and one from the Telegraph) and fed the for and against comments through Wordle to get a picture of the language being used.

Wordle 1 contains a hard-hitting message: "Government wasting money/time: pointless cost". Detractors are concerned by the "frivolous" nature of Twitter, how can our money be spent on single-line communications?

Wordle 2 for the use of Twitter is more subtle. A possible headline reading is "useful social value/worth". Comments for the use of Twitter acknowledge its affect is limited when used for purely broadcasting but that it can provide great value as a tool for generating new relationships and dialogue.

Personally I am very much for the use of Twitter and other social media by government for three key reasons:

1. I get to see what is going on inside the organisations I work for so I can better tailor my company's services to their needs
2. I find out things I would not have thought to look for
3. there is an opportunity for people to create new dialogue with government

I suspect in this forthcoming election campaign we're going to hear much more about the benefits and pitfalls of Twitter!

Damian Watson

The idea is that the writer should employ a balance of Show and Tell. Show allows readers more space to use their own imagination, to put themselves into the shoes of the protagonists.

For example compare:

"The white male suspect was 6ft 2 inches with black hair and blue eyes. He was wearing blue denim jeans with white trainers and a dark blue jacket."

With:

"I looked back at Brody. He was pinching his cigarette between his fingers, with a sort of twitch. His hand seemed to be shaking a little. His brown poker face was still smooth."

In the first we are telling the reader. We have a mental picture of the physical characteristics of a man but we have no indication of his thoughts or his feelings. In the second (from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler) we can empathise with the character, we can feel his nervousness and his attempts to conceal it. Chandler is showing.

So how does "Show, don't tell" play out online? Let's imagine we have launched a service.

A "Tell" content strategy will tell us a lot of textual information about the service, how it fits into the organisation's 10 year plan and who are the people driving the policy. It will tweet to us about how the senior management have launched the service strategy at a landmark event. Essentially a "Tell" strategy is analogous to holding up a mirror and writing about ourselves.

A "Show" strategy is going to tell the stories of customers using the service. These stories are going to appear all over the Internet in places that the customers go to. Coming to this content I am going to be able to put myself in the shoes of a customer.

NHS Choices online gives us both. The A-Z section is our tell, we have a detailed list of all the services Choices can supply us. Looking at the homepage though all we see is a collection of different stories: http://bit.ly/bHd28J . Searching on YouTube I find a whole NHS Choices channel showing peoples' stories of health issues.

These stories allow you and I to understand our relationship with the organisation, to project ourselves as beneficiaries of a service. When a service is communicated in purely a telling style we are going to find it very hard to see ourselves as beneficiaries of that service. If all we had was the A-Z we'd have a hard job understanding what was for us and what wasn't.

So take a look at the content your organisation is publishing online. Is it engaging your customers and showing them how they relate or is it just telling them about itself?

Damian Watson

If you are starting a business now and whether you are selling a product or many products you will be thinking about how you can sell through an online channel. Selling online can greatly reduce your overheads allowing the smallest of producers to compete in a global market. 

Whilst reduced overheads are an important advantage in "pure play" online retailing (i.e. no High Street presence), in this article I want to look an even more valuable element, the "long tail". 

First of all, let’s imagine a book store before the Internet called “Sports Books”. It’s in Rugby. It is a specialist bookstore focussing on (you guessed it) sports. It stocks four thousand sports books that have been supplied by a handful of publishing houses (distributors) each of whom have their specialisms. 

John lives in Rugby and is a keen fisherman. He wants to buy a book on fly fishing so asks a fly fishing friend, “Where can I get hold of a book on fly fishing?” The friend replies, “Well there’s that sports book shop isn’t there, on the high street.”, so off John goes into town to see if he can find a book he’d like at the shop. Oh no! He discovers they haven’t got any books on fishing.

As a rule, this is how retail used to operate. Shops get products from distributors. People go to town and buy things in shops. What people buy is limited to what’s in the shops. What the shops stock is limited by the distributors they have relationships with.

The problem as experienced by J R Hartley

In 1983 one of the most popular adverts ever was aired in the UK (it was recently voted 13^th in Channel 4’s “100 Greatest TV ads”). It featured an elderly gentleman looking for an old book on fly fishing by the author J R Hartley. He travels around all of the bookshops in town looking for the book only to be turned away empty-handed each time. Eventually his daughter hands him a copy of the Yellow Pages and he finds the number of a specialist bookshop who have the book. They ask him for his name and he replies, “J R Hartley”. If you’ve never seen it then search for J R Hartley on YouTube, it’s rather charming!

Yellow Pages’ message was that using their business directory would save you time in the search for things you wanted and needed. J R Hartley spent energy in trying to find his book the “old-fashioned” way by traipsing across town having to visit individual shops. He was disappointed and frustrated in his search. His daughter, representing the new way of doing things, solved his problem by handing him the directory.

Only 10 years on...

Staying on the subject of books, let’s skip forward just a decade to 1994. This was the year Amazon started selling books online and started a revolution in retail.

Before Amazon if you went to a book shop and couldn’t find what you were looking for, the store had to check their retail catalogues to see if they get hold of a copy of it. If they didn’t you would have to go elsewhere. Having a copy of Yellow Pages improved on the situation by organising the names of the stores for you in your local area but you still had to call all of those stores and what if they couldn't get hold of a copy of the book either?

What Amazon did was to build relationships with book distributors all over the globe. They compiled a catalogue of all of the books available from those retailers and allowed you, the buyer, to search that catalogue without even having to leave your home.

Amazon's store fixed the J R Hartley problem completely. Now if John wants to find JR's book on fly fishing he simply types in a search for "J R Hartley fly fishing" and there it is. He can now buy the book and the whole process has taken him 5 minutes. Oh, and they suggested a CD of fly fishing music, an umbrella and some waders to go with it. Great!

Where I've been leading you to in this story is that Amazon and the other mega e-tailers succeed because of the huge product catalogues they are able to pull together because they do not need to store stock in a physical location.

A traditional book store stocks books that it thinks people will buy. It has a limited amount of space so builds partnerships with enough distributors to fill the store. It will sell lots of books abut within a relatively small number of titles. It will not stock books that it doesn't think will be popular to its customers.

Pure play online retailers are so valuable because not only do they sell the things held by other stores in large quantities, they sell lots of the things stores don't stock in small quantities. They sell less of more! The diagram below illustrates this:

Fly Fishing by J R Hartley is a specialist interest book (well actually, the book was written after the advert and was very popular but let's pretend otherwise!). The local book store doesn't have a copy because it can't sell enough of it. The local store's catalogue is represented by the red part of the graph. Amazon sells the "red" books too but also can sell all of the specialist "green" books that less people want to buy.

Now compare the size of the two areas and you can quickly see the potential value of the long tail. So what does this mean to you?

If you aim to sell other people's products online then you should be looking to develop as many distribution relationships as possible. Aim to sell less of more and build out your long tail of products.

If you are a producer of products a healthy part of your online activity should be geared towards finding the right people to sell your products for you. Sure, you can build your own store but then you've got to generate an audience. A retailer with a substantial long tail is likely to have a substantial audience to go with it. Let them do some of the legwork for you!