Social media is changing and the Conservatives need to catch up

You would think the question “how many Conservative Party members are there in the UK?” would be an easy one for Google. The search engine, after all, isn’t fazed when I pose the question “how many hours is it until Christmas 2020?” (28,248) and it has some fascinating insights when I ask it whether cats dream. But enquire about UK Conservative Party membership, and it’s stumped. Why? Critics claim it is because Conservative Campaign Headquarters is too embarrassed to release statistics. The last number published by CCHQ was 134,000 back in 2013 – and now, that figure is estimated by pollsters to have dropped by around a quarter.

To put that in perspective, Sturgeon’s waning Scottish National Party, which operates in only one tenth of Britain, has 120,000 members, and Corbyn’s Labour crossed the half a million line some time ago.

The easy explanation is that Conservative-minded voters believe in a small state so will always be less effusive in their support for political parties. If, like Corbyn and his band of followers, you believe that more state intervention is the answer to all the world’s ills, then taking to the streets and social media to cheer-lead for the fashionable party which you believe would intervene most effectively is the most natural thing in the world. If, like a traditional free-marketeer, you believe that the role of the state should be limited to keeping half an eye on the market, then you probably find it more difficult to stump up the sort of enthusiasm needed to become a member of a political party. It may be empowering to march for more funding for hospitals, but it’s plain weird to trudge around with a placard advocating fewer regulations in the asset management industry.

For years, this has suited the Conservative Party just fine. It was taken as a given that big donors were the ones who would always win elections, and members were not considered except at election time, and then only as something of a necessary nuisance. In the Conservatives’ book, the key to campaigning success was to put pre-election time and energy into getting the big donors on board, and then satiate members’ enthusiasm with a post-election signed thank you letter – just enough to sweeten them up in time for party conference season.

During the 2015 campaign, when sponsored auto-play videos were an exciting and relatively new phenomenon on Facebook, this strategy worked a treat. Awash with cash, the party could cream off the top marketeers to create slick social media campaigns, and instantly, millions of Facebook and Twitter voters would swoon.

‎By late 2015, the Cameron machine, presumably dizzy from its unexpected election success, was so bought into this top-down approach that he went as far as planning a mass cull of the old party members, whom he believed had reached the end of their useful life. Grassroots politics had never done much for the Conservative party, and if social media campaigning was about to make it obsolete, well, that was very convenient indeed.

‎Unfortunately for the Conservatives, it turned out that they had put their eggs in the wrong basket. David Cameron was quite right that social media would become the most powerful campaigning tool in British politics, but Tory campaign professionals got the money aspect badly wrong. Smart ads emblazoned with professional logos had the novelty factor in 2015, but since then, the public has wised up.

The vast majority of those who use social media now readily admit that they ritually ignore sponsored content and are only influenced by what their networks are saying. Gradually, as Web 2.0 got more and more interactive, it became increasingly difficult to buy success online. These days, the videos that go viral do so organically, and they aren’t professional at all: they’re often made by people at home, engaging with their networks.

‎If the Conservatives are serious about reinventing their social media strategy, they need to accept that CCHQ can no longer “do social media” on its own. However much cash the party pours in to its digital wing, photos on instagram of a taxidermized Michael Fallon looking slightly menacing “behind the scenes at Conservative Party conference” are never going to go viral – or if they are, you can bet it’ll be for the wrong reasons.

The answer is to rethink the party’s approach to cash, and to accept that social media campaigning needs to be grassroots, organic, diffuse. ‎The Conservatives don’t have a problem with money, because amazingly, their small but powerful base of rich donors haven’t yet given up on them, yet. But strangely, they act as though they do.

‎In the run-up to the election, I worked at CCHQ and was astounded by the number of people who wrote in at the beginning of the campaign pledging their support for Theresa May. The one that most stands out in my mind is a twenty-two-year-old woman, Lily, who wrote a moving email detailing exactly why she believed that Theresa May’s steps of Downing St vision would change her mother – an MS sufferer’s – life. Instead of a friendly response thanking her for sharing her story, she received an automatic reply telling her that if she wanted May to succeed, she should “donate today”, even though she had explicitly explained in her email that because she was financially supporting her mother, she wasn’t able to give any money.

Rather than crude fundraising with the aim of pouring money into the black hole of digital advertising, the Conservatives should take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book and use the money they’ve banked from big donors to organise proper events up and down the country with the aim of attracting people like Lily. It sounds anachronistic but it isn’t: countless studies prove that young people in our “connected age” are lonelier and more disconnected than ever before, and they are desperate to be part of the sort of communities their parents and grandparents took for granted.

This approach wouldn’t just help shake off the nasty party epithet, it would also create the sort of support than now wins elections. It may be distasteful to the higher echelons of the Conservative Party, but communities of eager, involved, grassroots members, who can create, share and like content (like the ones Momentum has in abundance), are now prize assets for British political parties.

We all know that persuading Lily to reluctantly give £5 is not going to win the Conservatives’ the next election, but her story, and thousands like it, when it’s shared around her network and her network’s network, well that might make all the difference.