It’s been a day of high political drama with The Sun announcing that it’s turning its back on Labour to endorse the Conservative Party at the next general election. Nobody would accuse us of underestimating the importance of online media and digital platforms, but we would never be naive enough to assume that when it comes to political campaigning or PR in general, that national newspapers no longer matter.  However, surprisingly, this seems to be the agreed attack line adopted this morning by Labour spokespeople being interviewed about The Sun’s decision.

Everyone from Lord Mandelson to Charlie Wheelan to the Guardian’s Michael White have been on the TV and radio claiming that The Sun’s explosive decision to back the Tories doesn’t matter in today’s internet age with falling newspaper circulations.  Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, the parties new media chief even went so far as to claim in a Tweet last night that “Labour doesn’t need The Sun. We’ve got Twitter.”  As wonderful as Twitter is, it won’t have been read by close to 8 million people this morning, alongside a full-colour pull-out poster detailing what the paper claims to be Labour’s shortcomings.

There were some interesting Twitter sentiment analysis carried out yesterday by the team at Tweetminster in response to Brown’s speech, which classed 53% of tweets as positive with 21% negative.  The analysis is great to see but I don’t think it tells us anything more than lots of delegates at the Labour Party conference and supporters were on Twitter yesterday afternoon.  I don’t think Twitter is significantly Labour supporting, so again McCarthy’s claim of ownership over the platform for Labour seems rather misguided.

The pure online impact of The Sun shouldn’t be underestimated either. This morning it’s launched a Google Adwords campaign bidding on keywords including ‘Gordon Brown’ and ‘Labour Party’ which state  “The Sun endorses The Conservative Party for the next general election.” The paper’s FeelingBlue campaign has already translated onto Twitter within hours.

Ultimately lets not forget the 23 million plus unique users per month to Sun Online. Beyond pure news coverage The Sun’s website will be a key battle ground for seeding video attack ads and virals during the election campaign – following today’s switch it’s a battle which Labour’s online team will struggle to win.