It started as a lovely day on the Halifax waterfront. Then there was a bad experience with some journalists. I haven’t asked him, but I’d guess it was Twitter that had the potential to really send Senator MacDonald’s day off the rails. Shortly after lunch in Halifax, @senatorjake issued a tweet in which he took [...]
THE WAY IT WAS For many years, political polling and focus group surveys have been done on the phone. Someone would call residential phone numbers during the dinner hour and ask a series of “sliding scale” questions. “On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree, how [...]
We knew since before this election was called that we were going to run a very social media focused campaign. The Green Party is not flush with cash like the other parties. –Camille Labchuk, Federal Councillor of the GPC For the days leading up to the election call, The Green Party of Canada (GPC) and [...]
I spoke with Brent Louks on Saskatoon’s 650 AM this morning. Naturally, the conversation was about the digital side of the election. One question stood out and I’m really glad Brent asked it. With all of the media attention and public hype about social media in the election, and my findings that the conversation is [...]
Trevor May, creator and curator of the fantastic website PoliTwitter.ca, has launched a new feature which tracks online reaction to election promises apparently based on the volume and sentiment of Tweets. The tool also has the smarts to parse out the RTs so the evaluation criteria is based on sentiment of fresh content. It would [...]
Since the election began, I’ve focused my monitoring and analysis efforts on content identified by specific hashtags (keywords that categorize the content) known to identify election related content. This means I made a conscious decision to go with the obvious traffic generated by people in-the-know and the people who retweet (RT) their updates. NOT EVERYONE [...]
I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with the genuine and genuinely talented Andrea Martin last week. I was photographing the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s (full disclosure: client) The Heart Truth Fashion Show and VIP reception. Just four days before the event, I happened to be talking to a friend about Club Paradise, the [...]
English language Twitter traffic has been getting a lot of attention in the election campaign. I did a cursory look at the French conversation a few days ago. So the Canadian Press and I worked together to dig a little deeper for a piece that was named Two Twitter solitudes in federal election. I thought [...]
Andrea pointed out that on the day I appeared in two articles on page A4 (March 28, 2011), the Globe and Mail “honoured” me by secretly embedding my first initial and last name above the paper’s masthead (highlighted in the attached photograph). In case you’ve missed it, over the last four days I’ve been on [...]
Let’s be honest. Following the Twitter conversation using the hashtags #elxn41 or #cdnpoli is becoming increasingly difficult. As I noted in an op-ed piece I wrote for the Ottawa Citizen, you need to have ADHD to assemble the fragments as they fly by. This is particularly true when people issue multi-part tweets where a blog [...]
When the Government was dissolved, we no longer had MPs. They became political candidates. As a result, 60 of the 171 Tweeting 40th Parliament MPs found themselves with account names identifying them as MPs — Twitter handles they could no longer use (36 Conservative, 18 Liberal, 6 NDP). Fortunately, Twitter allows account owners to rename [...]
I couldn’t in good conscience go to bed without providing an update on the election Twitter activity to date. As of 8:25pmET, 17,105 Tweets have been issued with either the #cdnpoli or #elxn41 hashtag, accounting for an esimated 14.8 million impressions (almost 44% of Canadians). It’s worth noting that similar activity for the last three [...]
Yesterday I shared some overall statistical information and analysis. Now it’s time to look a little deeper. As it turns out, Tweets using one of the hashtags #cdnpoli or #elxn41 and the word coalition have a decent share of voice. They account for 1,986 updates or nearly 15% of identified election Twitter traffic; an estimated [...]
It’s expected social media is going to be all the rage for candidates in the current federal election. Using them and using them well are two very different things. Here are some tips on how to best use social media during a political election campaign. 1) BE AUTHENTIC First and foremost, know that people relate [...]
Thanks a million to Claude Boucher for stopping by and alerting me in a comment to my last post that “French-language tweeps have decided to use #fed2011 rather than #elxn41 to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. #cv11 is also used for bilingual discussions.” I’ve run run those hashtags through Sysomos MAP as a unit since there [...]
If I had to guess, a Saturday election call 30 years ago would have generated some buzz by the dinner hour. It may have even gained fresh attention on the Sunday. Real chatter would likely have to wait until the Monday — the beginning of what I’ll call a fresh news cycle. It’s 2011. How [...]
I wonder what the new version of Peace, Order and Googleable Government will look like after May 2. More importantly, I wonder if the role of digital will be as prominent during the next session of Parliament as it will be during the election. After all, there are more than a few Canadian MP Facebook [...]
One more graph before I get back to following the #rhso (Rideau Hall Stakeout)… This Word Cloud (generated with Sysomos MAP) illustrated which words appear most prominently in the 162 blog posts about Canadian federal politics which have appeared in the last 24 hours. The more common the word, the more prominent it appears in [...]
The Canadian population on Twitter may be small (August 2010 estimate by comScore: 4.5 million, 13% of Canada), and the number of political Tweeters even smaller, yet they sure were a vocal bunch yesterday. Politicians, political media, pundits and political enthusiasts were absorbed in farewells (including longest ever serving House Speaker, Peter Milliken), Glen Pearson [...]
The NDP became the first official federal political party to release a mobile app, yesterday. The iPhone app, aptly named the NDP Jack Layton app, is a free download on the iTunes app store. The app currently provides three short articles (one on the budget, of course), and allows users to stay current with a [...]
It’s hard to escape election talk online right now. Opposition party response to yesterday’s budget announcement pretty much ensures we’ll be heading to the polls this spring. Analysis using Sysomos MAP shows federal election buzz has reflected that reality with a roughly fourfold increase in traffic across the board. Online news media coverage increased from [...]
Trevor May runs the Canadian digital-political observer site PoliTwitter.ca. It’s a fantastic resource for online political junkies like me. So, I’m only too happy to oblige a request Trevor made of me to share the list of MP blogs. This list is current as of February 8. Each name is linked to the blog. I’ve [...]
In the real world, communities have historically formed around geography (e.g. neighbourhood), common interests (e.g. politics) and common situations (e.g. parenthood). The good news is that the digital world is part of the real world. So, online communities similarly form around geography, common interests and common situations. There is a common belief about online communities [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about communication in some industries being highly regulated. This means laws exist which dictate what must be said and what cannot be said by companies in specific industries, and when those restrictions apply. Publicly traded companies must disclose their financial position in quarterly reports and hold an annual general meeting [...]
