Congratulations to Lynne Featherstone, who has become, she believes, the first British MP to use the Twitter instant messaging system, just slightly less than one year after I first suggested on my blog, and in the forums here (party members only).
Those of you unable or unwilling to read the forums will be unaware that the idea was initially dismissed out of hand by influential party bosses, before they went on to embrace it wholeheartedly. Now the entire Innovations Department is happily twittering away.
Barely a month afterwards, the party used Twitter for a highly successful if under-used election day results broadcast system. That has since been relaunched to a similarly successful and similarly under-used short news system. Follow this link for full instructions on how to sign up to it.
A quick google, and I find a Guardian story about Alan Johnson MP using Twitter for his Labour deputy leadership election campaign. In the US, however, Twitter is much more a part of the scene. Both Clinton and Obama have feeds – as did pioneer John Edwards until, erm, about four months ago.
Back on this side of the atlantic, you can get twitter updates for Iain Dale – barely three minutes ago he posted the all-important information about heavy snow in Tunbridge Wells. And the following Lib Dem luminaries use twitter:
My next bright idea for Twitter is an opt-in Conference service for vital conference information like where’s uneaten free food, what’s hot on the fringe, oh, and maybe, vote-by-vote updates from the conference floor. Watch this space…
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21 Comments
Are Rob, Will, Mark, Mat, Brian and me not good enough for your list 😉
Well… Mark’s link is private, and I was trying to find people who generally twittered about Lib Dem stuff, although I accept I don’t either…
Brian, obvious overlooked him!
I should have mentioned Ryan is doing all sorts of amazing clever stuff with Twitter as well as just twittering.
I live twittered Eurovision last year. You can’t get much more LibDem than that!
Didn’t everyone live-twitter Eurovision?
Ahem: http://twitter.com/pinkdog
Woof woof.
I twitter about Lib Dem stuff when I’m doing Lib Dem stuff—did the London Hustings last year, might use it to liveblog stuff in the future. It’s a good use of my 300+ free texts a month now I’m living with the person who used to get most of them…
I like it more and more now active people are using it. Porting it into Facebook using Sync is also useful, although it does mean everything starts as if there’s an “is”…
Pinkdog – argh! I know you weren’t there a couple of hours ago because I checked!
What sad people.
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies…
The sooner you all fly away and leave the world to serious people the better.
Tony Greaves
Funny how a piece of purile playground posturing can’t be made to look sophisticated purely by dropping in a completely unrelated Keats quote. You’d think it’d work but… nope.
Alliteration, on the other hand – that’s where it’s at.
Tony
Twitter is just another communication method. You can use it for good, you can use it for campaigning or you can use it for prattle, and the truth is most of the time, you use it for a mix of all them.
Tony. A hundred years ago, when a major news story happened, people checked the papers the next day. Fifty years ago people turned on the radio. Thirty years ago they turned on the TV.
The earthquake that hit recently? Nearly took down the BBC website, they had a massive traffic spike. The age of a leaflet through every door being the best and only way to campaign is coming to an end, now it’s just another bit of junkmail.
We need to embrace the change that modern communications gives us, and that means experimenting with different methods. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc?
All different methods of communication. It used to be people joined the party because a local Cllr or MP helped them and persuaded them to get involved. I joined the party because my MP commented on my blog and asked me to a meeting.
Plus ca change. Twitter is just another type of leafletting, aimed at a different audience. What, exactly, is your problem with us trying new methods anyway? You use half of them.
And me and me!!! Click my name!!! :@))
Alex, there is a need for us all to keep up to date with this; but many of us will need guidance. Anywhere we can get a LD idiots guide to understand all this? As for Tony, he’s been beyond guidance for more than a generation.
It’s twittering that is puerile playground posturing!
There are some serious points here. One of the shocking problems about the way we are going is the degree to which everything is more and more instant. And the more instant it gets the more trivial it gets.
Another serious point is that just because something exists does not mean it is good, useful or should be used. For instance I use email because it is useful (though it has it’s downsides such as the explosion of unnecessary communication it has caused, and the decline in written politeness and increasing familiarity in serious formal communication which is a thoroughly bad thing).
Twittering seems to me to have few real benefits and none at all in a political context.
(I suppose it’s a sign of the times that quoting a line from the greatest English poet
since Shakespeare is thought to be “puerile posturing”!)
Oh wad some pow’r the giftie gie us…
Tony Greaves
Apologies for the rogue apostrophe. I can’t find a way to edit my postings here.
Look at the number of followers the “leading Twitter’s” identified above have. It’s pretty clear that this is far from any sort of mass medium. Facebook, twitter, blogs, even websites and bulk emails all have as their defining characteristic that people have to “opt-in” to access the information. That makes them very suitable for activist recruitment/encouragement/development but less so for mass communication.
The bigger issue is that when you put a political message in front of people there is a lack of engagement – I don’t belive that the answer to this is just to find a a more sophisticated technological way of putting information in front of people.
Hywel, the number of people ‘following’ me on Twitter itself is both small and irrelevent. Twitter is a tool I can use to create content for use elsewhere. A small number of people read my “tweets” on Twitter itself. But they get transferred elsewhere and fed through to a number of locales.
My target “audience” is distinctly not activists or even members, mostly it’s non-politically aware types. But my tweets can vary from “I’m stuck in a train” through to “good meeting with local Cllr/MP/PPC about X”, and they do get read, and sometimes commented on as well.
Biggest use for a politician I’d say would be to embed them as a feed on the sidebar of their main site and also improt them to Facebook as Status updates—recent activity, updated from anywhere very quickly and easily. There are other things that can be done, if we figure out how to do that effectively we’ll do that too. If it can’t be done effectively, then, well, it’s fun trying.
Tony? I refer you to the words of the great Douglas Adams on new technologies and age.
As a technophobe of a similar generation to Tony Greaves (no mobile, don’t know how to text, never looked at Facebook) I’m not quite a dismissive as he is. Our problem today is the overload of information we are bombarded with, but Hywel is quite right to point out that the new technologies are allowing people to decide for themselves what information they want and how they are going to access it. I ‘found’ LibDem Voice as a result of a bulk email from Lord Rennard about a year ago and it has changed the way in which I get my political information (I still subscribe to LibDem News but read less of it – the by-election results I get the next day from John Hemming or Sean Fear on politicalbetting.com, and frankly it is more interesting to read an article on LibDem Voice and be able to join in a discussion about it than it is to write and post a letter to LibDem News). The new technologies are changing politics in ways that we cannot necessarily forsee: I doubt that Twitter is the future, but then I don’t understand why my grand-daughter spends so much time on MSN. Tony may be right about the trivialisation of politics, but this has been going on ever since the monopoly of written communication was broken by radio, film and television. And for every Scot who went to hear Gladstone speak at inordinate length in Midlothian there were probably a hundred down the pub.
I use all the new technologies but still love to read Lib Dem News – I think they all reach such diverse audiences when put together we surely must be reaching much more of our members than ever before? I only found Lib Dem blogs about 6 months ago through the Lib Dem toolbar – which is fantastic. I think all the different types of communication compliment each other very well.
I’m feeling maybe twitter is a bit out of my area of interest though – I really can’t see the point to it…I think the status function on facebook is much better. But a matter of personal choice I suppose…:@)
And Flock Together (which may start sending out personal reminders at some point)
Jo. Using one of these two apps (I use the latter), you can have your twitter updates become your status updates as well (it’s my primary use of Twitter). Which means you can update status while travelling or similar via text message.
http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/
http://apps.facebook.com/twittersync/
Twitter itself is just a tool, and while I’ll check it fairly regularly, it’s the ability to send stuff elsewhere that makes it useful, not the site itself. I’d also have recent updates display in the sidebar of my homepage if I’d got around to updating it recently. Twitter is more useful than a Status update. Alternatively, you can get your status updates ported to your twitter, but I can’t see the point, the Twitter interface is easier to update.