How tech-savvy is your MP?

Adam Hewitt • Published 7 Aug 2008 12:00 0 Comments

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POLITICIANS don't have friends - they have 'fans'.

Facebook is the politician's favourite social networking website, with its average user that bit older than those using its rivals like Myspace and Bebo, and so more likely to know where to stick their X come election time.

But politicians on Facebook are not really people, but brands - and like-minded folks register their support for them in the same way they would for an 80s TV series, an oddball pressure group or an up-and-coming comedian.

Online politics is all the rage, with MPs desperate to grab some of the success it has had at mobilising support and improving communications with the grassroots in the US. While no MP could ever hope to approach Barack Obama's level of Facebook support - 1.25m fans and counting - some do run a tight social networking ship.

Reading East MP Rob Wilson keeps a decent Facebook page, although with a slightly anaemic 35 supporters.

But his team keeps the page

up-to-date - harder than it sounds in the world of e-politics - and he is even surfing the online video boom, with links to videos of himself on YouTube. He keeps the site updated with press releases and recent news and events, but there is no real discussion on his 'wall'.

His website covers similar content, but is also well updated.

On the other side of the IDR, Reading West MP Martin Salter is giving his website "an overhaul" and has stripped it of older content and ancient news.

He seems to be leaving Facebook well alone too. He therefore scores badly on any interactivity meter, but to his credit he does dish out six ways for the anxious to reach him - two addresses, a phone number, an email address, his face-to-face surgeries, and the MP's post box at the Civic Centre.

Meanwhile Richard Benyon MP is the perhaps surprising winner in the website stakes, with an attractive, well-designed and very up-to-date site, complete with a top three spot at the British Computer Society's Best MP Website awards in November. He also has 45 chums on Facebook.

But none of these MPs run a real blog - Mr Wilson comes closest, but still simply reproduces his diary written fortnightly for this paper. Westminster might have Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, gossipmongers running profitable and widely-read blogs that give the mainstream media sites a run for their money, but Reading makes do with its closest equivalents - ex-MP and expat Jane Griffiths (who is, as we all know, 'the one'), and Cllr Warren 'should he still be doing this' Swaine, who runs satirical gossip site muckspReading.

But blogs can be dangerous for sitting MPs - the best sites rely on lashings of wit and plenty of insider gossip, which few MPs can risk plonking straight onto the public record. One rogue word or an opinion out of line can and will be stripped out of context and plastered all over other people's blogs, then the newspapers - and then it's a telling off from an irate party leader with better things to do.

But Wokingham MP John Redwood mostly avoids this, writing an award-winning blog, updated daily, setting out his views on Labour's failings, social policy, public spending, the EU - big and complex issues.

But by blogging constantly and in an authorly rather than gossipy style, he keeps it interesting, and usually avoids unwanted headlines - despite one controversy earlier this year when he discussed the differences between stranger rape and date rape, to the chagrin of some campaigners.

Even councillors aren't immune - Reading's Richard Willis got himself in trouble and in national headlines late last year with his online comments about Ian Smith, the former white minority ruler of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), while former mayor Chris Maskell has been titillating his many fans for more than a week by dropping hints about an upcoming defection on his own site. Watch that space!

This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 07 Aug 08

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