“The parties acknowledge that social media can be used to mobilise activists, engage new audiences, or harvest a long tail of donators,” says Ovum senior analyst Vuk Trifkovic. “However, unless the parties have a surprise up their sleeve, we do not believe that social media will play an integral part of the campaign efforts in the forthcoming elections.”

“Last night’s chancellors’ debate and the upcoming leaders’ debates make it far more likely that 2010 will be remembered as the ‘TV election’ rather than the ‘social media election’.”

There’s a reason for that, in my opinion. Campaigns, in essence, are one-way communication periods - by the time a campaign comes around, policies should have already been worked out, key messages prioritised. The public’s part to play in an election campaign is to listen, judge promises and to act by voting...

The periods between campaigns, however, are the periods ripe for citizen engagement. These are the times when parties should be listening, both to their grassroots and to the electorate…

Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign is often hailed as a seminal one for online politics - but it was 2004 Democratic candidate Howard Dean who made most strides harnessing the web; not just to campaign, but to rebuild his party’s consensus through dialogue (read his campaign manager’s book on the subject). This, too, is what the Conservative party’s grassroots blogosphere has been doing since the Tories lost the last election - debating and getting its house in order in time for the upcoming election. Now is the time voters get to judge that work…

Ovum nails it: “Election campaigns have a finite lifespan.” The ambition for a one-off “social media election” belies the hope that online citizen engagement in politics could be perpetrual, not every five years.