By Chris Lee

Social media has been credited with being pivotal in the success of Barack Obama’s 2008 US election campaign. The 2010 UK General Election is the first time that social media is being used to woo voters, such as the Labservative viral from the Liberal Democrats, and it’s another LibDem MP that has become the subject of a social media campaign, treasury spokesman Vince Cable.

Cable – a career economist – has been credited with forewarning the current economic crisis and a group of social media consultants from various political backgrounds have launched an online campaign – InVinceCable – which is pushing for Cable to be made Chancellor of the Exchequer in the event of a hung parliament after the 6 May vote.

InVinceCable was the brainchild of a number of leading UK social media consultants and NMK’s Chris Lee caught up with one of them, Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd, to get the lowdown on the campaign and its objectives.

For the uninitiated, what is InVinceCable all about?

There were a few of us down the pub – as many of these good stories start – and we decided that of the three candidates for Chancellor of the Exchequer, possibly the most important role in the UK in 2010, Vince Cable was by far the best qualified. And, being social media types, we decided to test what we think Obama may have proved with his campaign and see if we could influence things using social media. And even after sobering up the next day we decided that, yes, it would be a good thing to have a go at.

Vince Cable himself is not behind this, who is?

No, we’re not even Liberal Democrats, this is an apolitical statement, and we just need the best man for the job. We’ve got about twenty plus people, including Adam Parker, Stephen Waddington, Mark Pinsent and it’s grown since and we’re doing it very openly. In fact, we haven’t met everybody, it’s one of those things where we’re coming online on a WordPress blog, website and a Wiki.

So what social media platforms are you using and how?

Well, it’s interesting, because all of us approach social media with an objective in mind rather than just say, “hey, I need a podcast”, as that’s a very functional noun-driven approach to social media and we’re very much advocates of the verb approach – “what do you want to do?”

So we try to use the best tools for the job which in 2010 are Facebook and Twitter. You can’t ignore those at the minute. If you’d been asking me two years ago I’d have said MySpace and if you’d asked me four years ago I’d have said Friendster. You have to keep track of which ones will work for you. We also use YouTube.

So how are you measuring impact?

That’s a subject close to my heart as everyone wants to close the loop. People get obsessed with return on investment, which is a tricky metric for this campaign as there’s no money changing hands. Each and every tactic should link back to your business objectives. You could say our outcome is to get Vince Cable to become Chancellor of the Exchequer but there’s no direct way that we can get the UK electorate to do that, they can only vote on a party basis not on who they want for any particular job.

That would be an unfair outcome for us to measure ourselves against so we’ve broken it down into more achievable components. For example, there’ll be three leader debates in the run-up to the election, the third of which is on the economy and we’ve made it a measure of the success of our campaign that the question is posed to both Cameron and Brown that if they find themselves running a hung parliament will they invite Vince Cable to be Chancellor given the overwhelming voice of the electorate that they just can’t ignore.

Social media and the general election - how much impact will it really have and who's doing it best?

We always overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. If you look back at John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 and Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 suddenly we think that in the matter of just a few years we’ve gone from social media not playing a role to having a role. But actually, if you look at Obama’s campaign in 2008 the vast majority of the impact came from simple old email marketing, which is getting into its second decade.

Let’s not get carried away with the power of social media. The best results combine online and offline. If you’re doing one without the other you’re missing a trick. We’ve not managed to do anything offline [with InVinceCable] yet but we’re learning what we suspected in the first place that the UK’s not entirely engaged online at this level yet.

You can hear the full interview, including how to create a campaign ‘Twibbon’, on the author’s InVinceCable podcast.