Monday 25 June 2012

BSD better buck up their online strategy

 I was rather horrified earlier to read this line from the Daily Telegraph coverage of the Better Together (campaign against Scottish Independence) launch today.

"The campaign has brought in Blue State Digital, the US political experts who ran President Barack Obama's web campaigns, to build a website and oversee its online strategy."

The reason being that throughout most of the Yes to AV campaign whenever Blue State Digital were mentioned it was often followed by the phrase "forgive me for swearing".

I have no doubt that they are very good at running US nationwide campaigns but when it came down to the dynamics of the recent yes campaign they failed miserably to adjust to the requirements of UK based campaigns. Indeed throughout the whole campaign despite me mentioning it from when I first got sight of their software it was impossible to search using any Northern Irish postcode. This is a common enough error in a lot of postcode based software, but one that I always checked on updates of the software I've used in any job that requires it.

But it was worse than that. Trying to develop delivery walks, or even to access the data to make the telephone campaign was incredibly difficult and took far too long to sort out when the issues were raised. Indeed issues were usually within hours of the latest update and took weeks to rectify if at all.

Therefore to have them oversee the online strategy terrifies me. I'm hoping the chain to get stuff updated online isn't as cumbersome as the Yes 2 AV leadership made things. I hope that rebuttals can get out there swiftly when need and leading the debate rather than constantly rebutting is the name of the game, taking Alex Salmond into areas that he isn't willing to have looked at too closely should be the battle ground.

For example over the weekend Joan McAlpine claimed "Scotland's future should be in Scotland's hands. We have 8.4% of UK population but contribute 9.6% of UK taxes." so in other words being part of the UK makes Scotland better off than the rest. So how is this plus the giving back with the Barnett formula of more per capita a keeping down of the Scots?

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