On why Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy ‘a bigot’ sparked a perfect social media story

The perils of going out for a loaf of bread in Rochdale

Yesterday was an unusual day and one that Gordon Brown will never forget. Personally, I feel quite sorry for him. You can accuse him of being short-tempered, autocratic and blinkered if you will, but one thing that I don’t think Gordon Brown is, is disingenuous. Today that’s exactly how it looks and I hope it doesn’t become the slip that characterises the end of his career. That would be unfair.

As some people have already pointed out, Brown was dreadfully unlucky yesterday. The audio fell straight into the Rupert Murdoch’s hands rather than anyone else’s; the sound was sweet and crisp and Gillian Duffy turned out to be a respectable lady with the perfect background for the Tory press to exploit.

But there was also some other factors that combined to make the incident into a perfect social media story. Here they are:

1. Time

Brown closed his car door a little after midday and Andrew Sparrow reported that ‘Gordon Brown has been caught on a microphone…’ at 12.18pm.

Britons were sat before their computers with their lunch hours approaching – time to discuss, blog, tweet or whatever.  For Gordon Brown there was another seven hours of campaigning to go before the evening, and the story had the whole day to play out.

2. Quality content

Shortly after Sky News producer Tami Hoffman had noticed, analysed then broadcast the audio it was being uploaded to streaming sites across the Internet. What’s more, it was high quality.

Within half an hour the video was featured on Brightcove and shortly after that it was uploaded to Audioboo and any newspaper or blogger could feature. With content to link to, people linked – circulating the story far quicker that the television could do alone.

3. Exposure

Social media excels when exposing perceived wrongs. Look at the Trafigura case last September or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death. Now here was the Prime Minister using scandalous language to describe a potential voter.

Just the type of thing to tweet about.

4. Narrative

The story lingered. First Gordon Brown was in Jeremy Vine’s radio studio, then he was back on his way to Rochdale, then he was in Gillian Duffy’s house and then he was on her doorstep, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Many newspapers live-blogged the whole thing and evening into the evening people were still tweeting about whether or not the Sun had paid £50,000 for a story.

It was very much like watching a long episode of Neighbours, albeit with deeper, Scottish accents. At 3.42pm, when Gilliam Duffy’s door swung open, Andrew Sparrow wrote something on the Guardian blog that summed it all up:

“Everyone: the door has opened. This is live blogging at its best. More follows.”

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Image credit: Downing Street