An influential Election 2010 blog created by experts from the School of Politics & International Relations and The University’s Communications Team has won the national Some Comms Award for Best Low Budget Campaign.

The social media campaign featured original expert opinion and analysis written by School of Politics’ academics and published online by Communications and Marketing.

At a cost of little more than £1,400, the campaign reached an estimated 46m people worldwide — coverage valued at over £4m.

The campaign aimed to promote the School of Politics and International Relations and its Centre for British Politics as a definitive source of expertise.

The blog won coverage from The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, the BBC, Sky, Evening Standard, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Articles swiftly moved from online into print and back again, multiplying as election fever escalated and inviting the roll-out of opinion, commentary and thought-leadership pieces.

The British Library has added the blog to its UK Web Archive for future research — demonstrating its clear influence alongside mainstream media coverage. As of May 23 it was — and still is — the No. 1 Google search result for “election 2010 blog”.

During the election, the term generated 106,000,000 results in 0.20 seconds. The blog was ‘highly commended’ in the category Most Innovative Use of New Media at the How-Do Public Services Communications Awards in November, shortlisted in two categories: Most Innovative use of New Media and Best Low Budget Campaign. It was also shortlisted for Best Use of Digital PR in the CIPR PRide Awards (Midlands) 2010.

See the blog at: http://electionblog2010.blogspot.com.