The professional online campaign?

The Conservatives are seeking to replace their web guru, or as they call him 'Digital Development Manager'. The tasks and skills required offer an interesting insight into the function of the various parts of the Conservative party's online presence and into how political campaigning is to be conducted; they are seeking an individual who will be tasked as follows:–

• Growing the user base of the Party’s three main websites: Conservatives.com, Webcameron and SortIt.
• Online PR and marketing - to include SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) optimisation, PPC (Pay Per Click) and email marketing.
• Possess a broad understanding web analytics packages.
• Developing new channels of digital content across mobile networks.
• Developing sustainable revenue streams across our digital portfolio.
• Organise regional events and activities to promote our websites.
• Distribution of email virals and online campaigns.
• Developing relationships with digital content producers and multimedia agencies for ongoing web campaigns.
  

What does this indicate? The priority is to draw traffic to the Conservative sites, monitor visitors, collect information and build a database among which to distribute viral emails. I guess it depends upon the person they hire, however, what is not mentioned is building relationships with visitors, just collecting contact details and subsequently spamming them. A second strand of their activity is making money, through pay per click advertising and perhaps attracting donations. This is already a feature of the 'get involved' page;which also asks visitors to spread the word by email or by insertign a link from their website (as above)

This is the new campaign professionalism that is shifting to the online environment; compared to the Sarkozy online campaign it is simplistic and old fashioned one has to say, however it may look different if the right person gets the job, but party think is strictly looking to the US example and not France.