Will 2010 be a Tweet Election year?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Twitter, Blog, Government, Internet on
With a general election just weeks away now, I’ve been wondering just what part Twitter will play in electing the next government? A new poll by Lewis Communications has revealed that 24 percent of the 1000 people consulted thought that Twitter was an essential communication tool in a democracy such as ours. That said, only 27 percent said they might be encouraged to vote for an MP who contacted them through their social networking service compared to 48 percent who would not be so minded. Mind you, one in six of those asked also thought that the barman in The Simpsons, Moe Szyslak, was a political blogger so maybe we shouldn’t take these figures too seriously.
A couple of numbers that did jump out at me from that survey though were related to online voting and political websites: 77 percent wanted to vote online this year, and 56 percent had visited a political website already in the run up to the General Election. Eb Adeyeri, Digital PR Director at LEWIS Communications, reckons that many people believe this will be “the UK’s first “Internet election” with politicians exploiting channels such as Facebook and Twitter to convey their message” but warns that a “badly-focused social media campaign could do more harm than good as Gordon Brown discovered with his infamous YouTube appearance”.
The Labour Party is taking Twitter seriously enough to have appointed a ‘Twitter Tsar’ in Kerry McCarthy MP, while Tory leader David Cameron famously dismissed Twitter users on a radio show by saying that “too many twits make a twat”.
Certainly there are more MPs, and would be MPs, using Facebook and Twitter than ever before it seems to me. Of course, the cynical side of me does accept that the rise of the micro-blogging and socially networked MP and the forthcoming election may be linked. There’s even less doubting that Twitter has become politicised to a degree, and loosely organised Tweet campaigns can be more effective as a lobbying tool than many other avenues when it comes to getting massive media attention in the shortest timescale. We’ve already seen many such groundswell campaigns on Twitter, and as the election draws ever closer I expect we will see many more. Of course, with that election looming we’ll have to expect less of these campaigns to be true feelings of the people events and more of them to have the hand of The Party pushing them.
But how can you track and analyse party political activity on Twitter? Sense Internet reckons it has the answer with the newly released the Tweetlection tool which
claims to track comments about political parties on Twitter, providing a picture of those politically motivated keywords that are most active at any given time.
“While all parties engage in tweeting, until now it has been hard to get a real-time picture of what is being said on key issues, and by whom,” says Sense MD Aidan Cook. “Previously it was difficult to get an accurate view of just how much excitement or interest a specific event or issue was generating”. Cook reckons that users will be able to get at a glance overviews of “the frequency of tweets over time for each party and the common themes in those tweets” which could help political parties modify existing themes and messages, or even create new ones.
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