Among the many promises broken during the course of the 2010 UK general election was the contention that this was to be Britain's first true internet campaign, won and lost Obama-style due to grassroots funding campaigns, intimate video messages and – anathema to the serious political pundits – soundbites on Twitter.
What we got was a sensational election dominated by some very traditional TV debates, while the promises of the web and social media seemed to provide an entertaining but superficial backchannel. But with two months' breathing space since 6 May, a refreshingly thorough report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism illustrates just how much impact social media had on the election, and particularly how the engagement of younger voters may have influenced the outcome.
Nic Newman, the BBC's former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. "This was never going to be an internet election," he says. "Social media is just another layer ... it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub."
Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.
When asked how they used social media during the election, 64% said discussing events, joining a group or clicking on links from a friend, while 30% said the TV debate was the biggest factor in swaying their vote – more than TV, newspapers or friends and family.
After decades struggling to engage the youth vote, the Electoral Commission had a major success with aboutmyvote.co.uk, which recorded 1.8m visits, 40% of them from 18-24s. But does the trend for paywalls threaten to cut off a supply of authoritative, informative online news for this group? Though few sites charge for access to general news now, an accelerated trend could mean this would be the only election where wide engagement combined with open sharing of information.
"It is clearly an issue, as social recommendation becomes bigger, that some of that content will be behind paywalls, and this is not just about the election," Newman says. "But it becomes more significant around election time, and an issue about access and the necessity to get free information."
The challenge is to engage individuals deeply enough that they will escalate from passive viewer to active participant. Aboutmyvote.co.uk certainly succeeded to some extent, but Photoshop also helped, as illustrated by the reworked campaign posters that littered the web. Labelled "the fifth estate" of grassroots commentary and activism by the report, this trend was made even more accessible by Clifford Singer, who launched mydavidcameron.com to invite anyone to customise the latest Conservative billboards. Singer claimed 3,000 posters were made through the site, and that spreading the images through Twitter and Facebook "enabled us to contest a £500,000 Tory advertising campaign at zero cost".
Was it a problem that so much of the backchannel commentary, particularly during the debates, was humour? Newman says analysing 1,000 tweets sent during the final debate showed 34% were jokes, with 39% definitely serious. But what matters is the quality of the commentary, not the tone.
"A lot of this was absolutely fantastic. It was like watching the debate with some of the best scriptwriters in the business – the gags came thick and fast," he says. Politicians' campaign trail anecdotes were so quickly and thoroughly parodied, he notes, that they were abruptly dumped.
He likens the debate to a Roman forum where everyone could have a say - "cynics and humorists heckling from the back, with activists closer to the debate making more serious interventions".
Those interventions included the Guardian's Richard Adams, who tweeted a link to figures on Eurozone debt levels in response to one point in the debate, while The King's Fund posted a link to its election guide to healthcare policies.
Overall, mainstream media has learned, through experimentation during major news events, how to involve readers and use social media tools; but for politicians, this was the first election where Twitter was taken seriously – more than 600 of them were tweeting.
"Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast," Newman says. "For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet."
Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.
"The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively," he says. "[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable."