Douglas Carswell's Blog

Twitter killed Tory Boy

Communication in the digital age is "long tail". 

It is not simply getting messages across via big hit media that counts.  Suddenly, there is the space for communicating with niche, distinctive, particular and local audiences.

Get social media right, and not only are you able to communicate with those niche audiences, but - because some of that niche will be mainstream media folk - you feed into the big hit media, too.  The long-tail media can end up wagging the mainstream media dog, you might say.

Digital means that a uniform message is not only impossible, but it is in some sense undesirable.  Try tweeting identikit soundbites, and you soon come across as silly.

When television, radio and newspapers were all we had, generic messaging was everything.  The internet makes politics hyper personal.  Hyper personal politics means hyper personal messaging.  As I suggest in my latest Telegraph blog post, politicial parties are only just starting to realise that they will have to learn to communicate in a far more personalised, less strident way.

Harry Enfield's famous Tory Boy character was famous for speaking .... well ... like a politician.  Twitter is killing that way of communication.

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