Political Penguin

If you’re a member of the Labour Party in the West Midlands then you’ll already have had your ballot papers to select who is going to stand in next year’s European elections. It’s a list system and the papers are split between sitting MEP’s and others.

That means we have to decide in an order of preference who to place number one and number two of the current two sitting MEP’s Michael Cashman and Neena Gill which will determine who comes top on the final regional ballot paper.

I’ll be the first person to admit that I haven’t exactly took as much of an interest in the procedure as I have in previous years primarily due to being too busy doing other things but the ballot papers need filling in and sending off.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Neena Gill. I’m presuming that I’ll get others from the other candidates and that the party is allowing them to send out their message to the members but I haven’t had anything from any other candidate yet. Apart from that, all I’ve had is an admittedly good quality leaflet from Michael Cashman and something today about some of the other candidates.

On the basis of the two, and bear in mind that I do take a keen interest in marketing and campaigning then I’d probably put Michael Cashman as my number one choice.

Within the context of purely their marketing approach, Cashman seems far more professional. I may still get some wonderfully professional looking piece of literature from Neena Gill but that will be too late because the ballot papers will be done tonight.

As I said, I take a keen interest in marketing, not simply just the message which is of course the most important part but style is equally important. The e-mail in question that I received was a simple plain text based e-mail which if you compare to the normal very professional looking HTML encoded e-mails that party members are used to receiving from the national party, it looked, well, just a bit crap. Incidentally the message didn’t say anything that appealed to me either and looked like it had been written as an afterthought following a night out on the lash.

One thing that did strike me though was the instruction and link at the bottom. In a vain hope that Neena might be getting down a jiggy with new technology it instructs you to go to YouTube and type ‘Neena Gill’ in the search. This of course I dutifully did and it returns only one result that is actually Neena Gill as in the MEP. Last night it had a grand total of 8 views which is now up to 50 odd so presumably a few other people have done the same.

I did watch the video. It didn’t exactly inspire me to vote for her either as the delivery was poor, wooden and still didn’t really talk about the issues that are important to me in a European context. Incidentally, here’s the video.

Me being the nosy sod that I am noticed that it had been posted by a user called ‘cafferty’ and was the sole video that he/she had posted to YouTube. Again being nosy I had a look at their profile and it reads as:

Name: caffie
Age: 21
City: Birmingham
Country: United Kingdom
Occupation: lazy-ass law student, professional slacker

Note to Neena. When embarking on an attempt at harnessing the marketing potential of the internet try to get someone who actually knows what they’re doing and not someone who lists their occupation as a ‘lazy-ass law student, professional slacker’ from Birmingham. It doesn’t quite give the right impression now does it?

Wondering then if Michael Cashman was on Youtube I dropped in a search for him. He doesn’t appear to have tried any kind of marketing approach as regards the use of new media (although he may yet e-mail all the members, who knows but it would seem a bit late to set up any kind of web based campaign) but there’s certainly nothing specific on YouTube. What there are though are a few examples posted by other people.

The first up is this one which at least to me comes across as a lot more fluid and professional a delivery on a subject that I do find important.

Incidentally, it’s been on YouTube a bit longer but has had nearly 4,000 views which isn’t exactly bad.

Yes, Cashman does have an advantage over Neena in terms of delivery on account of his previous profession before entering politics and just for you delectation here’s a snippet from his past.

Right, that seals it, anyone who goes to deck Pete in the Queen Vic gets my number one vote.