UK election - old media and new media - who was the winner?

There has been quite a debate in all forms of media about the role of mass media versus new media in the election.  Jon Snow summed up what many believe that online in the UK election has played a limited role compared with the Obama campaign, although he was writing during the campaign.  Reflecting on it after the  campaign what role did new media play?

Talking to Paul Simpson an active LibDem tweeter, and in the Top 30 Political UK tweeters (as well as a colleague at Greenwich) - he felt that Twitter did not have a great campaign and was used primarily by the parties to amplify messages with lots of aimless re-tweets, but not to develop discourse.  (Is Twitter losing some vibrancy generally?).  A good overview with links and a summary of the overall social media campaign is provided by eModeration which highlights the strong vote for the LibDems on the Facebook poll  where apparently over 400,000 took part.

One point which I don't think the commentators in mainstream media have made enough of, was the good turnout.  There was some talk in the run up to the campaign that there might be a low turnout in the 50s.  In fact the election achieved a UK turnout of 65%;  UK Electioninfo provides some good data on turnouts since 1945.  What is striking is that since 2001, turnout has been growing when it nearly went below 60%.  Are we seeing social media's influence in these figures and is Facebook combined with the impact of the TV debates perhaps the real winner for this campaign in energising young people and getting them out to vote?

Crisis PR at BP

Watching how BP handles the major oil pollution incident off the US Gulf coast is going to be very instructive in terms of crisis PR.   The severity of the situation is immense, even for a company of BP's size and experience in crisis PR situations. It is also in a politically sensitive area just recovering from the effects of Hurricaine Katrina in 2005 which has given an added dimension to US coverage and that is an aspect which is somewhat different than many crisis PR situations facing organisations.

My impression is that after a slow start BP is starting to get its crisis PR team into action with mainstream media in the UK!   However the USA is another matter and social media also looks weak.  The comments on Twitter suggest an increasingly hostile reaction as more information comes out but also quizzical that BP does not appear to have an active policy of communicating across all channels of communication including Twitter.