As I wrote about here, I was quite intrigued to see how Canadian politicians were using social media, especially Twitter, during the election. Now that the election is over I find it interesting to see who has kept up with their Twitter stream and who has not.
Of the five major candidates it seems that Stephen Harper is the politician that seems to have his Twitter streams updated the most often. The streams can be found here and here and here in French. Even the Prime Minister’s flickr stream is still being updated.
I would really like to hear feedback from you on why you suspect some politicians have been keeping up with social media, and others have not? Do you think that social media played a role in winning votes?
The Twitter streams of Stephane Dion, Elizabeth May, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe all fell off the radar immediately after the election. Perhaps each campaign had a volunteer who had the responsibility of updating the streams, and since the election is over their services are no longer required?
I have noticed that Liberal MP Dan McTeague’s Twitter stream is update frequently alerting the public of rising or falling gas prices in various cities across the country.
We also have http://electopinion.ca/, http://www.netprimeminister.ca/ and http://www.govtweets.ca/ still going strong aggregating Tweets mentioning politicians.
Was it even necessary for these politicians to sign up on Twitter to begin with? Is the point of Twitter to broadcast information about your next campaign stop, or would it have been put to better use engaging in conversation with users who sent @messages?
With the U.S. election on Tuesday it will be interesting to see if Obama’s use of technology to help organize his campaign will continue if he gets elected.
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 3, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Ben Babcock
Clearly some politicians’ campaigns used Twitter and other social media as a temporary gambit to garner additional votes, especially from the demographics more likely to engage in social media than traditional encounters–i.e., they did it because it is “cool.” Since it’s not necessarily the politician who’s updating the Twitter feed or whatnot, I don’t think we can ascribe this to that politician–it’s possible that he or she didn’t make a decision regarding whether or not to continue using these social media; the PR manager or whoever was responsible for these media made that decision on the politician’s behalf.
I do not think that social media played a large role in this election. The mainstream media still treat social media warily, as evidenced by how CBC’s Susan Ormiston handled the online reaction on election night with kid gloves. Social media’s real triumphant will come when it is integrated into the election coverage without distinction or discrimination. I think that social media has come closer than ever to making a difference–as Jesse Brown reported in CBC’s Search Engine podcast after the election, the blackout on election coverage was broken by Twitter uses, bloggers, etc.
Often it’s the comedians who adopt social media faster and use it better than mainstream news broadcasts. Observe Rick Mercer’s use of a blog to repost his weekly rant and his open Photo Challenge. These are people who thrive on interacting with their audience, so new social media provides them with these wonderful new tools. Traditional news broadcasting, on the other hand, simply imparts information to the audience without inviting a dialogue. We need to see the form of news broadcasting shift toward conversation before social media makes more than a superficial impact.
Still, the minor effects that social media had on this election show that its influence is increasing. As the current youth succeed older demographics in the workforce, they’ll bring with them these social media to which they’re so used and integrate them into the workplace and daily life, creating a new wired generation of Canadians.
November 11, 2008 at 7:26 pm
thatsroger
Thanks for the comment, Ben. You raise some good points and I would tend to agree with you. I don’t think that using these tools made many people change how they vote, but it’s interesting to see how this trend will rollout in the long-term. PM Harper’s office is still updating Twitter. I work for the Government of Canada and even found out about the newly appointed Parliamentary Secretaries by checking my Twitter stream before anyone else in my office got the news.