THE GENERAL ELECTION AND ONLINE MARKETING – AN ECHO CHAMBER?

The talk is all about Facebook. The Guardian today covers the news that a “A tool exposing how voters are targeted with tailored propaganda on Facebook has been launched in response to what is likely to be the most extensive social media campaign in general election history”

For those outside of the online marketing bubble it is still big news that “creative” targeting is used on Facebook. Interestingly though, take a look at your Facebook page. Mine is the epitome of an echo chamber – my contacts seem to hold my political views, and if they hold and share extremely different ones, then I could (and maybe have) blocked them. The advertising as well is, firstly, still very limited in volume, and when I have seen ads they have been for the party I am already likely to vote for. This suggests to me that the parties are still falling in to the trap of preaching to the converted, and that tool isn't going to surprise you greatly when you look at how you have been targeted.

Now I don’t have access to how the parties campaigns are being run, but having had some insight into previous election campaigns, political marketing struggles in similar ways as all paid online marketing – optimising to the correct metrics. When assessing performance, how do you do this accurately?

If you are Online Marketing Manager for The Labour Party for instance, high pressure, tight budgets and a real need to demonstrate results – the easiest way is to target advertising to the groups that are likely to return demonstrable success. “Of course” I hear you shout, of course you would target your marketing to those channels or audiences that perform best for you – that’s basic! However, think what this means – if you are running Labour's paid social what does this mean in practice – would you target people with an expressed interest in Trade Unions or readers of the Daily Mail? If you show an ad to people who have expressed an interest in Trade Unions you are guaranteed to achieve better results than showing that ad to Telegraph readers.

That is of course if your tracking of success is any standard onsite metric – Trade Unionists are far more likely to be interested in your argument, engage with you, and complete whichever action you are aiming to complete.

This though is counter intuitive, while of course Labour need to get their voters out they could really do with swinging some voters too. So what is more valuable, 50,000 people interested in Trade Unions reading your manifesto or 1,000 Daily Mail readers? It is essential that the parties take this into account throughout their campaigns, otherwise they will just be throwing more echo into the echo chamber that is increasingly our online lives.

Now there is evidence that this is changing - "In one instance, they [Britian Stronger In Europe] targeted Facebook users who had expressed strong support for a Premier League team through “likes” with a post about the impact on their side of foreign players needing visas in the event of Brexit. People who had mentioned they liked surfing would receive a message about the value of EU regulations on beach pollution." I just hope it isn’t only one side who have come up with clever ways to get tailored messages out to new audiences.