When I ran, unsuccessfully, for local office in 1999 I was one of the few candidates anywhere in BC that had a website - shocking to believe this was 12 years ago. Realistically it was never going to be very useful for me in Lillooet in that election. Still, as one of the people that brought internet to the town (and later a community radio station) I felt it was important to use the new technology.
Now it is important for every serious candidate to have a web site and make use of social media. The problem is that few people make any decent use of either. It is hard to find the candidate sites or the social media presence and when you do find it, it tends to rather bland and stale. One of the candidates for Victoria City council is trying something interesting to change this.
Lisa Helps is using a Twitter hashtag #LisaHelpsQA to give people a way to ask her public questions and allow her to answer them. I am not sure how well it will work, but at least it is thinking in a different way about local elections and how to communicate with the 65,000+ people that can vote in teh City of Victoria.
I am not sure how this will hold up if dozens of candidates do the same, but she is the first and has the media to herself for the moment.
4 comments:
Hi Bernard
Using a twitter #tag as part of campaigning in this year's local elections is not new. Rob Wickson, standing for election to Saanich Council, has one of the best websites out there and he is using social media, facebook and twitter. Rob has a great social media and communications team supporting him. Please check out Rob's website and FB Community page. You can of course also follow him on twitter!
robwickson.ca
Christina Mitchell
Senior Campaign Advisor
Using a campaign hashtag is not new, it is this interactive use that is new as far as I can tell.
I think it is a very interesting way to allow for a public debate with a candidate.
Interesting article,
I've done some recent consulting work for a provincial election candidate in Ontario. To talk of the change between sites over the last decade necessarily invokes consideration of the fact that Facebook now has 800 million active users. and 10 years ago the web was 1.0.
While the concept of the social media baseline has already been mentioned by Christina - having facebook, linkedin, twitter and youtube/vimeo at a minimum - and the use of twitter in election campaigning is not new, I am surprised at Lisa's particular twitter account name.
Whereas questions and answers may be what she will use the account for at certain times, will she and her team use this twitter name to broadcast her other tweets? This points to the problem of having several social media accounts where one is needed. Also consider the pitfall where someone may subscribe to one account but not another. There are solutions to this problem ( proper API linking ) but overall this points to another question. If Lisa would have created a twitter hashtag for a twitversation about weekly or daily QA's would this have been a better communications solution?
She's using a hashtag when an @-mention would be more appropriate. Sounds like she doesn't understand Twitter to me.
Post a Comment