DVLA warns staff they will be monitored for anti-EU comments on social media

Staff at the DVLA have been warned that their emails and private social media accounts will be monitored during the EU referendum campaign to ensure that they are supporting the British government's campaign to stay in the EU.

DVLA management have told their staff that the rules forcing government civil servants to promote the campaign to stay in the EU applies to DVLA staff as well, even in their own time and in a personal capacity. The PCS union is strangely silent on this draconian infringement of the freedom of speech and association of their members at the DVLA.

The remainians are getting desperate ...

EU planning to ban under 16s registering on websites without parental consent

The EU is due to approve new harmonised data protection regulations today that will see under-16s banned from providing their personal details to any website - including social media - without their parents' permission.

The typically ill-thought-out regulations would make it illegal for the likes of Facebook and Twitter to allow under-16s to sign up for their services and prevent charities offering personalised support services for victims of bullying or sexual abuse. Breaching the regulations will attract fines of up to 4% of the company's turnover.

The idea that a child can be held criminally responsible at the age of 10 but needs "protecting" from giving their name to Facebook is ridiculous but you only have to look at the EU cookie directive to see how utterly clueless the EU where technology is concerned.

The Tories Are Moving To "Spotify" Their Party - And It Could Be The Death Of UKIP

On Friday, a very ominous media development took place that could profoundly affect UKIP's destiny.

No, I am not talking about Godfrey Bloom, but rather that the High Tory grandee Charles Moore used his column in the Daily Telegraph to advocate reorganising Tory party organisation on social media lines.

When a mainstream, middle aged High Tory like Moore writes in such terms, you know that
Douglas Carswell's ideas are finally gaining traction. This followed Tory Party chairman Grant Shapps' move to finally publicise membership figures and in particularly those of individual associations, in order to incentivise them to experiment in new ways to attract members.

This is potentially disastrous news for UKIP. Yes, the Tory party has many deep seated structural and cultural weaknesses which will make this a difficult road to travel: it has an arrogant, snobbish leadership and a culture of centralised cliquish control. It is not trusted by great swathes of the electorate and has manage to seriously alienate vast numbers of it's natural supporters. However, it still retains vastly greater financial resources and more, if deeply demoralised, members than UKIP does.

Indeed, the Tory party has absolutely no choice but to go down this road. Now with a considerably smaller number of members than the Labour party,  the distribution of it's vote means it has nonetheless considerably more marginal seats to defend. Furthermore, the ruling out of a pact with UKIP by Nigel Farage means it will face highly committed and enthusiastic UKIP activists across the country. Many of these will be ex-Tory activists who know their territory and who are thirsting for revenge on their former party. Without a rapid increase in membership, the party's re-election efforts look doomed.

Of course our voting demographic includes a great number of people who would never dream of voting for, let alone joining, any kind of Tory party, but Labour won't be far behind either. It would not surprise me at all if major social media initiatives were announced at both the Labour or Tory conferences.

Like it or not, these cultural changes are inevitable, and a small party like UKIP with limited financial and personnel resources simply can not afford to lose "first mover" advantage in radically reorienting the structure and culture of the party on social media lines.

Nothing is as dangerous as success, as the saying goes. It is far too easy to be complacent given our recent increases in membership to sit back and regard all as fine and dandy. Instead of congratulating ourselves on having 30,000+ members, we should be asking ourselves why we don't have the 4,000,000+ that some voluntary organisations like the National Trust have. Once upon time those sorts of membership figures were common for political parties, there is no reason why they can't be again given the right cultural changes.

But will UKIP be among them?

It has often been the fate of new political parties in Britain to have a brief "shooting star" moment; to burn so very brightly in the sky before just as quickly dimming and going out. Few now remember the old SDP, even though it had stratospheric poll ratings during some periods in the 1980s. Likewise the Green's had their moments in the sun, but are in decline now. Somehow the hoary old ugly sisters, Tory and Labour, manage to adapt and survive when they look ready for the chop.

Be in no doubt, there is nothing to stop UKIP from sharing the fate of so many upstart movements that have gone before it. Despite the huge opportunities we have at our disposal, with weakened and dangerously exposed political rivals, we are a very long way away from sealing the deal. And that deal can only be sealed using the tools of social media already so predominant in virtually all other areas of modern society.

Using Twitter to Influence Your Campaign Messages

I've been invited to speak next week to do a presentation on 'The impact of social media on political PR'. I plan to talk about how the internet has made it much harder for PR hacks in politics to spin or market their messages to people. I also however, discuss the potential which social media has brought for public relations in politics which in my opinion, far outweighs the negative impacts it has brought.

A very simple tool that candidates and campaign directors (I've abbreviated this to CCDs in the rest of the article) should be using is Twitter. The role that Twitter can have in a campaign isn't simply to send messages out (of which even this basic role isn't utilised by the majority of candidates).

What is the point in sending out messages on Twitter if you don't know what messages people are interested in or care about? Just as it would be marketing suicide for a marketing communications team to do no research on their target consumers, to just send out messages blind folded and hope for the best the same would be so in political marketing or campaigning.

CCDs should be using Twitter to collate and analyse the behaviours of Twitter users to influence and craft their overall campaign messages.

The beauty of Twitter is the ability to listen to the people that matter and those people only. For example, rather than watching the Tweets of everybody in the world, or the UK, or even a city, you can watch the tweets of people within the area that you are contesting a seat in.

This can be achieved through a number of methods. The first one, the most basic, is simply by typing in, through Twitter's search box, the area that you are standing in. For example, if I were standing in Cannock, I would search Cannock and I would see all the Tweets from people who have mentioned 'Cannock'.

Even though I know little about Cannock, the people of Cannock or their needs and what's important to them a basic search like this gives me a fantastic focus for my campaign. These tweets have shown me that Cannock Chase, is important to the people of Cannock as well as cycling there:

So now that I know Cannock Chase is popular, I then can go to Google News and see whether it's been mentioned in the local news. From this Google News search I can see that parts of Cannock Chase were being threatened with being sold off.

There we go. That's one of my messages. "Vote for John Jones for Cannock, because UKIP believes Cannock Chase should not be for sale"

This method of PR and marketing research for an election campaign is so easy it is painful that UKIP candidates are not making use of it. Not only this, it's free. What would have cost thousands of pounds not even 10 years ago and taken weeks if not months of research (questionnaires) is now free and instant.

If you would like any help or advice on using Twitter to help aid your campaign please do not hesitate to contact me. Use me whilst I'm free.