Please correct me if I’m wrong, but what happened with the election. Well, I know what happened, the coalition and all that, but where was the digital election. This was meant to be the first election fought online. But it was that old school medium of the television (remember it, big square thing sits in the corner) that stole the limelight.

Sure there were the rolling blog twitter style updates on come of the newspaper sites, and there were some… err…. interesting, functionality for when the debates were on, such as the worm! The worm was a sentiment tracker apparently, although it tracked the sentiment of a chosen and small group of public with key pads not social media as I thought it was. But where were the real digital stories? It was TV that created them all.

First there were the debates, that made the stories, that sold the papers. Then poor old Gordon Brown left his mic on and his poorly chosen comment was picked up…on TV. And then to make things worse, he apologised on radio, the granddad of all mediums. I was expecting him to resign to the Queen by telegram.

There was all this talk before the election started about an online election revolution, that the US had last time, but it never happened over here. There were the odd politician tweeting, the odd candidate who had to apologise for a badly judged tweet, a few bloggers blogging, and the famous Web Cam. An, I voted button for Facebook, a twitter mashup on the guardian on polling day, but there really was nothing extraordinary at all.

Why was this? As a country are we not ready for this cultural revolution yet? Are the generation who use social media, still not voting in the election? Are politicians still scared to use social media, afraid one mishap will be around the world in seconds? But then, Mr Brown leant that happens on TV as well. Maybe it was a combination of all the above.
The funny things about all this is, in an election where no one won a majority, in an election where every vote really could have mattered, no one really utilised a channel that could have motivated a whole generation to vote.

Where were the, get the vote out campaigns, where were the virals, where were the clever campaigns. The only campaigns that worked, that generated news coverage, were the sites quickly set up for UGC spoofs of campaign posters. Is this digital’s place in the world, the fun naughty younger brother?

To me this was a massive disappointment, the main parties really missed the boat on this one. They could not only have won some extra votes but they had a chance to really show younger voters that they were the party of the future, who understood how they communicated and talked to them in their favoured channels. In 5 years times, I don’t think they will have the choice, by then it will be online or bust.

I will showcase great pieces of digital creative from time to time. This, I think, is a brilliant way of engaging influential online bloggers and using them to market and promote your brand for you.
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