It’s Friday. Let’s have a little fun, shall we? Thanks to Boing, Boing for bringing this great video (and musician) to my attention last week. You can see more videos by Diego Stocco (including one in which he plays a tree as a musical instrument) on his YouTube channel.
Andrea, Lucy, Bayla and I will be walking as part of the “No Pink For Profit” team in this weekend’s Run for the Cure for Breast Cancer research. You can read more about our opinions about pink-washing by individuals and companies trying to turn Breast Cancer into a brand in an earlier post. As I said in [...]
Things are picking up. Three of four provincial elections wrap up next week, with the fourth going to the ballot back the week after. So, this is going to be the last time I’ll be looking at the top six issues of so many provinces at one time. Note this analysis does not consider sentiment. [...]
In my earlier analysis of online chatter about last night’s debate, I completely forgot to include a breakdown of leader mentions flagged as part of the online debate conversation using the #ondb8 hashtag. Tim Hudak led the pack with nearly half of all mentions which included leader names (1,716). Dalton McGuinty (986) and Andrea Horwath [...]
Certain online activities give off a rank smell. I’ll admit I was tipped off by an NDP supporter on these. The investigations are my own. I reported on my blog last week about what appeared to be a Liberal supporter who was acting in a way that reflected badly on the party (see You’ve gotta [...]
Ontario’s digitally-connected political enthusiasts took to Twitter for last night’s televised debate between Dalton McGuinty, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath. It was a gathering that combined to generate a lot of traffic which I analyzed using Sysomos Heartbeat and Sysomos MAP. The geekiest used the #ondb8 hashtag to flag their tweets (5,447) and combined with other [...]
The #momthevote movement earned a healthy amount of national media and political attention during the federal election. The movement was organized to get mothers discussing election issues and rallying for mom voters on May 2. It was one of those efforts made possible by and grew because of social media. Women joined the conversation mostly [...]
I’ve been fairly critical of the Ontario NDP’s use of digital in their election campaign. Well, to be fair, they’ve done very little well as a party. So, I was just YouTube surfing, following a chain of videos leading from a recent episode of NPR’s amazing storytelling radio program This American Life. I was going down [...]
There’s little doubt Twitter will continue its dominance of online chatter about the Ontario provincial election. I’m tracking an average of 3761 tweets/day, roughly one third of the average number of daily tweets tracked during the federal election. Still, Twitter traffic about the provincial election accounts for 75% of the overall election conversation. What’s more [...]
For our family vacation, we travelled to Alberta by train (Via’s “Canadian” route), shoehorned almost every incredible southern Alberta destination into 10 days, then took the train home. It was incredible (read more). I’m planning on doing something longer form with the photos and video of our trip. In the meantime, here’s a bit of [...]
The Ottawa Plane Pull challenge is taking place right now. It’s a charity fundraising event that pits teams of 25 people against each other, pulling a commercial airplane a certain distance in the shortest time possible. It’s an incredibly fun event. Last year I produced a video of the event for the Ottawa Airport Authority. [...]
The following is a look at the six most actively discussed issues in the online chatter between September 17 and 23 in each of the “other” provincial elections currently underway. All analysis performed using Sysomos Heartbeat. Newfoundland The top tweeter (and still reining champion) in the assessed period is @thefightingnewf (208 relevant tweets). energy (397 mentions) education [...]
It’s been a particularly interesting week in the Ontario provincial election, sparking many conversations. Not surprisingly, I’ve chatted with many people about the election. With the press coverage surrounding Anthony Marco’s podcast fresh in their minds, everyone brings up the subject of smear campaigns in elections. Some recounted the smear campaign directed at Jack Layton in [...]
As you can probably tell from my posts over the last few weeks, there’s a lot to analyze on the use of digital content and social media by the political campaigns. I find trends in digital conversations, particularly those during election campaigns, fascinating. Sysomos MAP allows me to run a variety of reports I haven’t yet shared in [...]
Meet Bernadette. She’s a 40 hour old kitten that was abandoned after birth. Our friend Sue Breen has rescued her. Sue’s something of an animal whisperer. I’m guessing, this quickly shot cat video is more likely to get lots of views than the documentaries I’ve invested weeks of my time and extended my passion to [...]
When CBC Ottawa film critic Robert Fontaine launched his book Movies Ate My Brain a few years ago, he told the All In A Day radio audience that he suffers through the crap at the theatre so his listeners don’t have to. His work is a “public service.” Let this post be my public service to [...]
In follow up to yesterday’s post You’ve gotta lock that down about political superfans presenting themselves in a way that apparently represents their favourite party… The Ontario Liberal Party’s superfan is relentless in his loathing of the other parties, particularly the NDP. Besides his extensive Twitter spamming campaigns, he has been promoting an online poll [...]
Many organizations and political campaigns spend hours fretting online criticism, informed and baseless. Either kind can be quite damaging. Supporters present another form of threat — superfans, in particular. Sometimes their enthusiasm and commitment to the cause can be a problem. Earlier today I was made aware of one such individual; a Liberal party supporter [...]
I wrote during the federal election that Twitter was as a real time focus group on the issues. Which means it’s just as important to take a step back and look at trends in the traffic as it is being involved in the conversation. This is true of all campaigns, political and otherwise. I’ll use the current [...]
Someone pointed out to me earlier this afternoon that she’s concerned about her pension and pointed out she hasn’t heard much mentioned on the subject this election. There certainly hasn’t been much online discussion about pensions (159) and seniors issues (575) in the last week. Pensions certainly follow taxes (3,231) by a significant margin. 72% [...]
I was at Rogers Television this afternoon to get to know the production process, meet Ottawa candidates in the Ontario election and watch the taping of the debates. This video shows some of the behind the scenes before and during the Ottawa Centre taping. The video features Veronique, Sue, Guy, Laura, Derick, Sean and Mark [...]
Merci à @HudakFrancais pour traduire mon poste. Les discussions en ligne à propos des élections ontariennes ne sont pas exclusivement en anglais. La comparaison est plus petite mais il a tout de même une circulation en français qui inclut les candidats bilingues et les circonscriptions francophones. J’ai 791 mentions en français depuis l’élection a été lancée (533 tweets, 226 [...]
Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) joined the growing list of Canadian provinces (and territories) heading to the polls this fall. The writ was dropped yesterday and immediately, online discussions about the election picked up steam. Twitter traffic led the charge, peaking at 461 tweets, news followed with 267 mentions and Facebook took third with 53. The [...]
Lisez ce message en français. The online discussions about the Ontario election haven’t been exclusively in English. While small by comparison, there’s been a healthy amount of French traffic including from candidates in bilingual and largely French-speaking ridings. I’ve tracked 791 French mentions since the election was called (533 tweets, 226 news articles, 28 blog posts and 4 [...]
The thing about politics, is you have to answer to a lot of people. Especially if you go online. Which brings us to another case of “The Bad” of the online campaign. Andrea Horwath has a tweet that won’t go away. It probably would if she or her campaign was paying attention to the online [...]
Earlier today I blogged about the top 10 online issues to date in the Ontario election. I’ve used Sysomos Heartbeat to chart additional breakdowns of these issues. Specifically, I decided to look at gender distribution for the top 10. The challenge with demographic and gender breakdowns of the digital world is the results are based [...]
Last week I published a report card ranking the use of Twitter by Ottawa candidates in the Ontario election. My evaluation looked at the 31 of 36 candidates with Twitter accounts, and organized them by grade letters. Then, to see who is actually listening –who is actually engaged– I put a question to those candidates: What does [...]
Which issues are dominating the last seven days of online conversations in the Manitoba and PEI elections? I generated some graphs with Sysomos Heartbeat. Manitoba Education moved up from the number two spot, pushing taxes way down to position five. New to the list are business and healthcare. Gone from the top six are employment and [...]
Like most elections, taxes is a bit of a freebie when it comes to important issues. So, it’s not surprising to see it’s the number one most talked about Ontario election issue in online channels. Despite Mr. Hudak’s efforts to get it into the election discourse, crime (which includes the “sex offender” announcements he made [...]
Elliot Ferguson has an interesting piece in yesterday’s edition of The Kingston Whig Standard. Significant signs explores the importance of visual cues in election campaigns and mentions research using fictitious campaign lawn signs to determine if they influenced voters into believing which candidates were qualified. The researchers concluded that in the absence of much other information about [...]
I’m often asked to share examples of good, bad and ugly use of social media by politicians and political candidates. This “ugly” one caught my eye last week. Ottawa Centre Conservative candidate Robert Dekker tweeted at 1:15pm on September 12 about a scheduled appearance on the CBC’s local afternoon show. Seven minutes later, NDP candidate [...]
Global Toronto’s Leslie Young and I had a great conversation about election attack ads yesterday. Well, to be fair, Leslie did a lot of listening. I talk a lot at the best of times. On the subject of digital and politics I have a lot of information, examples, stories and numbers I can share – [...]
Yesterday’s story about the immigration scandal in PEI caused a spike in online traffic. In a province not known for Twitter activity, the report contributed to yesterday’s 68 election-related tweets, 28 of which were about the scandal. The PEI election hasn’t seen that level of traffic since last Friday when people were buzzing about nominations, debates [...]
The Ottawa candidates of the Ontario provincial election face off next week. Rogers Television is hosting the debates, one for each of the nine local ridings (see the television schedule). As part of the debate panel, I’ll be able to bring a question from the online community to the debate. That means you have an [...]
I’m starting to gear up my local election research to prepare for my role on the Rogers Television election team (you’ll notice the #RTV22VOTE hashtag in some of my tweets). I’ll be heading up the “digital desk” on the debate panels and during election night. Before reviewing the Twitter accounts of all Ottawa-area candidates, I [...]
The Ontario provincial election is generating a significant amount of online traffic. Twitter accounts for 73% of the 32,915 mentions tracked over the last seven days. Online news media is a distant second (15%) and communities and conversations taking place on Facebook hold down third (6%). The dominant issues are taxes, employment, energy, education, family [...]
I’ve had the pleasure to meet all of the Ottawa Centre candidates and interview them on the role of digital in the Ontario election and how they’ve integrated digital into their campaigns. The attached podcast is a digest of the four interviews. You can listen to the full length of the individual interviews in the [...]
It seems the most popular of my recent posts are those that identify opportunities for political candidates and parties to improve the level of integration of traditional and digital tactics in their campaigns. So, I decided to explore some of those opportunities as they apply specifically to what we know as social media. I should [...]
Here’s what people have been talking about — ONLINE — in the Manitoba, Ontario and PEI elections over the last 48 hours. My analysis was performed using Sysomos Heartbeat. Manitoba Twitter dominates a fairly calm online landscape. The Canadian Wheat Board’s plebiscite dominates online traffic in the Manitoba election. The most active tweeters are @blumenthal5 [...]
Since immersing myself in following online political and election conversations and the use of digital by politicians and advocacy groups, I’ve become aware of sites that report specifically on known hash tags. The Toronto Board of Trade, for example, has partnered with Nexalogy to conduct a real-time assessment of Tweets associated with the current Ontario [...]
A few people asked me which issues were the most talked about online in the various elections taking place right now. So, I ran some analysis using Sysomos Heartbeat, one of the tools I’m using to monitor the fall elections, for the period ending this past Saturday (September 10) and found out a few interesting [...]
Anthony Marco is a digital content creation machine. I first met him at PAB2010, a conference about content creation and audience engagement. He delivered a fantastic lightning talk called A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures. He’s one of Canada’s most prolific and collaborative podcasters, and the first Canadian podcaster (I know of) to throw [...]
Tim Hudak’s Facebook Fan page is the hottest leader-hangout (so far) in the Ontario election. Not because he has more fans (15,857) than any other Ontario party leader (McGuinty 5,462, Horwath 4,885 and Schreiner 367), but because his page is getting an average of 124 comments per post. Wow! Granted not all comments are positive. This [...]
The web is not like mainstream media. The former is participatory and interactive; the latter is appointment-based and geared towards passive consumption. That’s probably why I shake my head that politicians think campaign digital content creation is simply uploading expensive television ads and media clips to YouTube. Job done. I was worried this would be [...]
Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak has taken a commanding lead in the number of tweets which feature his name — something we analysts call “Share of Voice”. In the last 24 hours, Mr. Hudak has been the subject of over 1,500 tweets. Unfortunately for Mr. Hudak, a healthy majority are not kind to him. He’s [...]
I’ll be as working part of the Rogers Ottawa election coverage team. There’s flexibility in how I’ll be doing the digital coverage, though I’ll likely spend a chunk of my time focusing on the nine ridings in Ottawa and the candidates in each. So, I started compiling the list of candidates and the links to [...]
Last night’s post seems to have upset a few people. Based on some of the tweets I’ve read, I see I must not have explained myself very well. Clearly I should have provided more background in the post. AureliaCotta9:39pm: @parismeilleur @markblevis oh how cute Mark, you must be one of those political types who thinks the whole internet [...]
A CTV.ca journalist asked me earlier today if social media would matter in the current Ontario provincial election. It was similar to a question I sought to answer in an op-ed piece I wrote for Post Media before this past spring’s Canadian Federal election. In short, the answer is no. Social media will not matter [...]
I’ve started tracking three of the Canada’s five provincial elections. I plan to follow all and still keep my wits about me. It’s a fascinating undertaking. Not only am I learning how Canadian politics is taking to the online world, I’m gaining (slowly at first) a better understanding of the nuances of our micro-political systems. [...]
I know that many people are anxiously awaiting charts, graphs, observations and analysis of the Ontario provincial election. So, I took a few minutes out to fire up Sysomos MAP and check out the chatter. It’s no surprise that related online traffic has nearly tripled over the last week. We’re already witnessing an even greater spike in [...]
It’s a big day for Ontario. Our children start school and the provincial election will be called. Ontario’s will be one of five provincial elections taking place in Canada this autumn (Alberta make deliver a sixth): Prince Edward Island (October 3) Manitoba (October 4) Ontario (October 6) Newfoundland (October 11) Saskatchewan (November 7) I will [...]
This sign sits in Fort Edmonton Park (in Edmonton, Alberta). It boasts several prominent typos and a spelling error. Can you spot them? What stylistic/editorial advice would you offer to the writer — and proofreader? See the image in my Flickr stream.
It’s time to remove the summer dust from my blog and exercise those writing muscles, again. There’s lots to blog about this fall, and I’ll get to that this week. We just returned from our longest family vacation – a 17-day western Canada immersion. We took Via‘s fabled “The Canadian“, a 67 year-old train that [...]
