If cold war technology allied with hippie communalism laid the foundations for the digital era, it’s no surprise that the US army is trying to exploit new trends in social media to spread its messages.

The branded Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube combinations now seems de rigueur. Military blogging is not new: one of the first military blog indexes was established in 2005 and currently has 2,603 military blogs in 43 countries 8,591 registered members. The official homepage of the US army, though, coordinates and vets social media efforts. It’s stated ‘strategy’ is: presence (‘to be present on social media to provide the official army voice’); relevance (‘create a dialogue that resonates with our social media audience’); and penetration (‘ensure that our messages get through to our audience’). Of course, there’s a sense of ‘if you can’t beat it, control it’ here -  managing information in ways that reflect well on your organisation. Also known as ‘spin’.

That strategic vision sounds like a re-run of Obama’s presidential election use of new communication media - and very like some of the uses of new media emerging in the UK election campaigns. One of those uses, just launched, is Labour’s attempt at crowd-sourcing its latest ad campaign. Take the moniker ‘crowd-sourcing’ away and it sounds very ‘Blue Peter’. I think it’s probably just an attempt to eliminate all the defaced/edited physical posters which have been the bane of Labour’s previous billboard campaigns: much easier to photoshop something out than to rip off a 30 x 30 billboard after the damage has been done. We await the results due to be published over the Easter weekend.

The military/political engines were always thus connected.