Two Tory MPs in East Anglia have added YouTube to their communications strategy to get across their political message. 
David Ruffley (right) speaks about the 
environment and Richard Spring (left)on education. North West Norfolk MP Henry Bellingham has also used it to express his concern about post office closures.
If you have a moment to look at them, I would appreciate your views as I am hoping to use YouTube with Julian Sturdy too. Is it something you find helpful and informative, does it give you an extra insight into the issues, does it help you know a little more about your MP as a person? Do you prefer getting information this way rather than reading about it?
David Ruffley sees it as being mutually beneficial:
“This is all about accessibility and accountability – there is massive scope for feedback and people are able to download my comments on topical issues and listen to them on the bus or train via their iPods.”
Richard Spring explains why he has fully embraced the digital era too:
“Keeping my constituents informed about my views, activities and campaigning is absolutely crucial to my work as the local Member of Parliament. I am keen to use all the different types of technology available to reach the widest possible audience.”
While it appears to have many benefits, it can also backfire and be abused. Do you remember the spoof video made by those two irresponsible Labour MPs Sion Simon and Tom Watson which invited voters to sleep with David Cameron’s wife Samantha?
And as virtually everyone has some kind of recording equipment included on their phone or camera, it will be easy to capture anything which is said that is detrimental and can be posted on YouTube. This happened to Senator George Allen who made racist comments which were posted here on YouTube.
This is still very early days for mixing politics with YouTube, so returning to my original request for your feedback on this, do you feel YouTube will be an additional useful tool to use to communicate with our social media savvy voters, does it demonstrate a more personal and transparent style, is it something you find appealing, what are your views about this?
Update 23 Jan: The Washington Post reports on US politicians use of YouTube.
Hi, Ellee. I watched the first politician you mentioned and thought it was quite a good piece of video. But I suppose it depends how you like to get your news or follow political campaigns. I prefer to read about things but I can see that politicians have to keep up with new technology, especially if they want to reach young people.
Hi Ellee,
I wish I was more familiar with politics over there, so the only answer I can give is I think politicians will use every form of communication they can to get their messages across. You Tube isn`t something I use because of our slow internet connection. I answered your questions in my comments at my own blog.
tea
xo
Youtube _ or whichever other video posting sites may then be in the ascendant _ are likely to be a critical way of engaging with (esp. younger) voters at the next GE. All PPCs should be gearing up for this. I work on this kind of thing professionally, and have tried to think of ways it can best be adapted to the party political arena. My guess is that what will work best is for candidates to record bite-sized clips on specific policy areas and local issues: e.g. ‘X talks about the environment’ ‘X talks about the threatened closure of hospital Y’, or even seperate clips for ‘X in insert ward name here’. None of these need be more than 30seconds – 3-4 minutes long. The existenc eof these clips can then be disseminated via email to local members and virally on thru the email lists of residents association/ community groups. They woul also need to be publicised via advertising on all party literature as existing on a ‘landing page’ with a short URL to try and reach those for whom no email address is held…. If it is not doing so already, the party needs to employ a search engine optimisation expert to try and drive our local party websites up the Google rankings. Also, more generally on new media: too many local party sites are hopelessly out of date. The central organisation could help here: for associations without the expertise/ time to keep sites updated, there should be a central point at CCHQ to which local PRs can be issued, for the centre then to post these on the local sites…
Podcasts are anther story and not worth the same degree of effort. I think people are not going to accept a ‘pushed’ RSS feed from a politcal party unless they are real political nerds. Not worth the effort. To make it onto someone’s regular podcast listening, it has to have really earned the loyalty/ trust of the recipient and to have the high production values people expect from their regular radio listening. I’d cite SciPod from New Scientist as a good example. Very few ‘talking head’ podcasts are anything other than lethally dull.
David, That is really helpful feedback. I particularly agree about local party sites being hopelessly out of date, this is something that should never be allowed to happen. Many thanks.
[…] How should politicians use YouTube? Two politicians in Britain are using YouTube to their communication strategy (tags: youtube strategy communication) […]
Useful if you can get it to work on your system, which I can’t.
It sounds like a good idea.
I did a movie demo of some software, and encoded it for YouTube, and it lost a lot of the resolution in the process. However, human faces do not. If you are thinking of showing things like charts or text, then expanding the size of text needs considering.
The other option to consider is to do your own video hosting.
I also agree with what David says about podcasts – they’re more about the dedicated listener.
James,
What problem are you having?
Tim
Tim, I’ll write to you in detail tomorrow morning. Thanks for the interest.
Its about time a few politicians started to embrace podcasting. At the same time they cant allow it to be all time consuming – there is the day job to consider.