The Liberal Democrats have been hoping to use location based tech to target floating voters.
In the United Kingdom, the Liberal Democrat party has chosen to go the high tech route by employing geolocation technology in order to be able to gear the content on the party’s official website specifically toward the local issues of the individual who is viewing it.
This is all being implemented ahead of the next general election in the hopes of appealing to a target group of voters.
This makes the Liberal Democrats the first among all of the parties to take advantage of the hyper local potential of geolocation. They have worked with Digital Element in order to put this technology into place. The tool that was created for them is able to determine an individual’s location at a sub-regional level so that they will automatically view the campaign literature of the candidate who is closest to them.
Through the use of geolocation technology, voters will see information about the issues most relevant to them.
That said, despite the fact that users will automatically be presented with local material, this doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to access the national messages that have traditionally been posted on the party website. That will still be available to them, but upon initially accessing the site, they will first see the local content, issues, and candidate information displayed.
For example, someone in southeast London will initially see information about the candidate named Simon Hughes, for Old Southwark and Bermondsey, but that individual would also be able to check out the broader national information, as well. This could potentially have greater appeal and relevance to that person.
According to the head of digital communications for the Liberal Democratic party, Bess Mayhew, when speaking about the implementation of the geolocation technology, “Viewing web content that is more personal and less generic can really impact the way people vote, and small margins can make a huge difference to the final result. In this election in particular, we’re going to see a lot more marginal seats, so those few extra votes can really make the difference.”
