There’s something interesting happening on the blogosphere at the moment. The most powerful political blogerati are on the right wing. The simplistic explanation is that they are in opposition, enjoy funding from wealthy individuals and enjoy more direct co-operation with the Conservative Party.

However the liberal left has it’s own heroes. One is Sunny Hundal, written about by me here and also by Colin Byrne, head of Weber Shandwick and former right hand man to Peter Mandelson.

Sunny has got a band of brothers together to have a go at maverick Tory MP, Nadine Dorries and her campaign to restrict abortion rights for women. All seems like classic blog-bitching, good fun but not quite political sea-change stuff.

But there’s more going on here. 

Sunny and other people he’s been working with, including other bloggers like Tim Ireland, have been researching Dorries and who she’s linked to. David Cameron backs her campaign as do our afore mentioned Tory A-List bloggers, Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie.

Again, lets observe how far this gets but I like it because….

a)     It shows that lefties can use the blogosphere to organise and start to achieve something. There’s implications here in how Labour might re-connect to its core vote.

b)     Sunny’s been cute at getting other ’stakeholders’ on board. Think tanks, campaign groups (such as the Fawcett Society), academics and old media (Guardian, New Statesman, Red Pepper).

They’ve formed a campaign group called Coalition For Choice and they’ve got a cunning plan that involves using old media influence and mobilising support using new media tools. I’m sworn to secrecy about what’s happening next but I’m intending to keep in touch with this one.

We brought you the scoop last month that Jerome Armstrong, legendary net roots campaigner from the US and author of a hugely influential book on the subject, had been signed up by Brian Paddick for his London Mayoral bid.

We now know that it didn’t do him much good but I thought it was interesting to look at what innovations were tried and which worked or didn’t.

The Lib Dem web supremo is Mark Pack and true to social media principles he was only too happy to share learnings….

Importance of emails - Data protection laws make it harder for UK campaigns to build up email lists and use them for different purposes, making it harder to achieve the micro-targeting used so successfully in the US. However where emails are sent, the readership rates are much higher than in the US. For the Paddick campaign they were several times higher.

Fundraising - Mark says the campaign was happy with what it raised online but we shouldn’t hold out too much hope for a Howard Dean-type avalanche of small donors to replace the oligarchs and tycoons. The culture in the UK is still to help your Party and to do it through delivering leaflets etc as opposed to donating money to a candidate.

Twitter - this caused a great deal of expectation and debate over whether this was being used as a gimmick. Mark’s view was  ….

“Twitter has some way to go to reach the story of mass audience that Facebook has, but it’s a good way of having a more engaged relationship with people than many other online tools.

“The Twitter interview seem to work well, though next time round I think we wouldn’t try to bunch up the questions for a batch of replies, but rather say, here’s a period of time when X will be checking messages and answering regularly”

All views welcome. As you may know, I’m a Labour campaigner but happy to take my hat off to what Mark did here in the cause of helping politicians adapt to the new media and the way audiences want to interact.

The Evening Standard has chased this scoop all week. So has PR Week as it seeks to preserve it’s status as bulletin board for all spin doctor type developments. BUT when Boris Johnson’s campaign chose to announce the big name broadcast journalist who Westminster reckoned was to become his new Head of Comms it was the blogosphere, Iain Dale and ConservativeHome in particular, who were given the exclusive that it is to be Guto Harri, formerly of the Beeb.

Makes sense. The Tory party is all about finding influence in society and using it. Iain’s readership is around 100,000 unique users per month but its not how many…..it’s who. Most factions in the Tory family, from Tory boys and blue rinsers right up to Lords and cabinet ministers check out Iain’s mix of gossip and musings at least once a week. Even Michael Ashcroft is a generous friend.

He also has excellent links to the Fourth Estate. He has a weekly column in the Telegraph, a weekly TV show on Telegraph TV, his blog is read daily by most political journalists and his tip-offs regularly become stories in the mainstream press. He’s also regularly wheeled out as a spokesperson for the blogosphere by Newsnight and the Today programme - two outlets that have high quality thresholds.

The interesting thing is, Iain is by no means a 21st Century ipod listening, techie-geek, early adopter. He’s just an old fashioned influence-finder who is using a simple online template to find an audience. 

Brands and public organisations take note - there are many like him.

Always thoughtful and never boring, Mike is one of the true ‘big beasts’ of NW radio. He’s recently returned from 10 years on London’s Capital Radio. Here and here he tells us why he went to London and what he thinks of the state of radio, specifically in the north west and what to do about finding new talent.

Mike has just started presenting Drivetime on the newly launched Rock Radio in Manchester.

Frenzied political campaigning has already started in little old Crewe & Nantwich, where a by-election takes place in a couple of weeks following the sad death of Labour MP, Gwyneth Dunwoody. This is (another) litmus test for Gordon, so expect all the big guns from all three parties to pile resources into this.

They’ll get a shock though if they try and buy up any online ad space as they try and catch the attention of those elusive young professionals or reliable silver surfers.  An enterprising web-marketing agency has bought the entire inventory on the Crewe Guardian  and Crewe and Nantwich Chronicle sites as well as the entire inventory from other mass consumer sites that focus on the constituency.  
Why? To better co-ordinate online political advertising across the constituency, and to provide synergies to existing clients who may want to influence the election. They’re auctioning it off in blocks – anti–ID card campaign group NO2ID is already running ads. Organisations that aren’t registered with the Electoral Commission are only allowed to spend £500, which is why they’re chopping it up into blocks (and targeting based on specific postcode, or other demographic criteria)

Who will buy it? The parties will utilise the service - but they’ve already got three other different 3rd-party influence groups signed up. 

PS The enterprising agency in question is MessageSpace,  run by my friend Jag Singh.  He has imported a lot of innovative techniques from the US, where he’s a web consultant on a lot of the Democrat campaigns and worth noting if you’re in the public/charity or lobby sector. 

For those still navigating their way around the evolution of Web 2.0 and what it means for social and business interaction, you couldn’t hope for a more lucid analysis than that of Clay Shirky who has just written Here Comes Everybody about what the changes in the online world mean for, well, the clue’s in the title.

Listen to him here.

As candidate for the biggest job in the world (that’s President of the United States, by the way), which commentators would keep you awake at night? The big journalist guns of the New York Times or Washington Post, perhaps? Or might it be a 61-year-old Pennsyvanian housewife and part-time (wait for it…) BLOGGER? Keeping journalists out of a recent Barack Obama campaign event in Pennsylvania clearly lulled the presidential contender into - well - saying what he really thought.  Unfortunately for him, the 37 cataclysmic words of his speech which included references to small town people being “bitter” and somewhat attached to “guns” and “religion” were reported on an influential liberal blog by Mayhill Fowler - an Obama supporter!

Within a day, the post had 100,000 hits and the Clinton PR machine was in full swing to capitalise on Obama’s comments.

Despite having zillions to spend on the best comms strategists in the business, Obama has learned the hard way about the new reality: in the world of citizen journalism, everything is fair game

An interesting insight into online professional networks can be found here with an audio discussion between FT management writer, Adam Jones, and LinkedIn’s Kevin Eyres. LinkedIn positions itself as a professional - as distinct from social - networking community in which business people can build contacts, get expert advice and manage their careers. Strictly no biting zombie applications or virtual sheep being hurled at one another here, methinks.

Facebook has launched Lexicon, a new tool that allows members to see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases on Facebook Walls.  For PRs, it’s another tool to monitor who’s talking about your brand, in a similar style to Google Trends or Technorati, but in the enclosed environment of Facebook.

After a few initial searches, I have some client names talked occassionally but nothing surprising. Of course, I’ll be monitoring it carefully when my next national news story breaks to see if the topic flows over into the Facebook conversation.

To be honest, it’s more fun to search for generic terms to see what unusual spikes and drops appear. Conversations about ‘Halloween’ predictably climb rapidly, peaking on 31st October. ‘Love’ is at an all time high on Valentine’s Day while there are fewer people wishing ‘Happy Birthday’ on leap day, 29th February.

According to the Facebook blog:

Lexicon pulls from the wealth of data on Facebook without collecting any personal information in order to respect everyone’s privacy.

Well that’s good news considering all the recent media hype surrounding privacy of online information. But Lexicon is a far cry from companies who constantly monitor conversations across social media such as 1000 Heads.

As their homepage states:

Web forums and communities are where these decisions are being made. In these public spaces, users discuss their thoughts and experiences, recommending, or warning against using certain products and services. This peer to peer dialogue is guiding the purchasing decisions of a new generation of information rich consumers.

Clearly an area of growth for some brands to invest in but an area that could be perceived as a moral tightrope for others. The rise in concerns over online privacy are only going to tighten especially with the introduction of Big Brother-type programmes like Phorm.

Smarties is that kind of sweet that you can’t help but like - psychedelic coloured chocolates that don’t stain your shirt. But, from a PR point of view, where’s the story?

Smarties have done a great job with a simple idea to launch the fact that blue smarties are back, having been banished a couple of years back for containing artificial colours/flavourings.

Commissioning a food artist to recreate famous faces and landmarks out of Smarties must have taken all of 30 seconds to think of (when in doubt, marry marketing and art, that’ll work!). But Guardian Unlimited likes it enough to feature all the art works on one of its galleries linked from the home page, complete with mentions for the blue smartie comeback.

The Smarties website takes the theme to its natural conclusion with a kids’ food art competition, with winners’ works exhibited at the V&A in London.

As this campaign idea shows - much like Smarties - some oldies are still goodies.