The internet is a source of vast swathes of information and data, from the BBC News website to social media like Facebook and Twitter.

In 2008, Barack Obama used this mass of information to help him win his presidential election campaign. He used social media and engineer his victory by taking advantage of big data. He looked at everything from location to interests and beyond, together he gained a profile of individuals, groups and localities, this enabled him to campaign both from the grass roots and from afar.

Since his victory, the Labour Party has began making moves towards becoming more “connected” but we feel this hasn’t gone far enough. Yes, we’ve got the amazing work of Movement 4 Change for ground campaigns, but what about tackling grass roots online?

In the Pew internet study during his the election campaign in over 18% of USA internet users talked about Obama’s campaign, over 45% of these watched at least one of his YouTube videos and a huge 83% of these survey participants of those were aged 18 to 24 and 60% of this age group took part in Obamas social media campaign.

These are staggering figures – let’s put them into today world. There are now more users than ever online in the UK, there are now more users than ever using and interacting with social media. However you look at it, most of those users will be aged 18 to 35 in the UK. Further than this, many users of social media are under voting age, but can still take part in your social media campaign.

So with this information in mind, what can we do as a party to Get Online and Get Back to Power?

1. We start today building social media profiles.?Every member of the party, every party area, every cllr and mp needs an account on twitter AND facebook.

2. Build websites that look good and have great content?Websites can be used to pass information around, blog about news and more importantly collect information about constituents (as well as keep them updated)

3. Plan for the next elections?Yes plural! Today is the time to start looking at the big data we already have and how we can best use that to our advantage in campaigns.

If we, the Labour Party, can pull together we can move past our defeat in 2010 and learn from the lessons of a great campaign of Barack Obama. We can utilise everything we know from contact creator and social media, we can collect information today for use tomorrow and we can win forthcoming elections.

Today, we must start building, because if we don’t they will and we must be at the forefront of technology if we want to win the next elections.

About the Author:

Andy Kinsey is the founder of Labour Online an initiative to ‘Get Labour Online’ with great web design and social media campaigns.

Twitter: @AndyKinsey

Links of interest:

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/6–The-Internets-Role-in-Campaign-2008.aspx

http://www.movementforchange.org.uk/

http://labouronline.org.uk