Apologies for the lack of sentence construction in that title, but I really can’t think of another way to put it. I know it’s my job to think about political social media, and most people don’t care as much as I do. But seriously guys, politics really is doing the Internet right!

Obviously there have been some awesome uses of online tools and platforms for largescale political gain in the past, for good or for bad – I’ll namecheck Obama, Kony and the Occupy movement as a sample – the list goes on and on.

However, in terms of getting day-to-day messaging across, we’ve mostly* seen Twitter and other available online tools used as a new distribution service for otherwise unaltered PR materials – and nothing more. This completely ignores the potential for a wider reach than the usual political crowd that the Internet allows.

This year, something seems to have changed. We’ve seen political organisers, informers and campaigners step it up a notch with their digital strategy in a slightly different way in the past few months: Continue reading →