Twitter Expert

Twitter for Politics

Back in June 2008, one of the key “quiet” news sources for Bloggers and Journalists tracking the Zimbabwe elections was a Twitter feed run by the Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group alongside their blog Sokwanele (”Enough is Enough”).

I ran a Flick-R photo feed about abuse and violence meted out by Robert Mugabe’s followers to those opposing his regime in the elections in Zimbabwe for several weeks.

Bur the Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/sokwanele was the place for breaking news. Here are the entries from late May covering the detention of Morgan Tsvangirai.

Here’s the Tweet that broke the news.

This is the first of two or three posts responding to the Convention on Modern Liberty.

Rather than going down to London, I stayed at home working and followed the stream of messages from the conference and external observers. This first piece highlights new insights from watching the conference alongside the “Labour 2.0” online campaigning conference held in London on the same day via the comment streams on Twitter and video.

But I start with a description of the mechanisms and services that I used to follow the conversation from the East Midlands, and a few thoughts about their importance.

The Convention on Modern Liberty is happening today, and is proving excellent.

If you wish to follow it, you can follow the live feed here.

Or you can follow the conversation on Twitter via the “Hashtags” (i.e., keywords) #coml and #modernliberty.

The best places to follow the hashtags are probably at the websites Twitterfall or Monitter.

The Downing Street Twitter Feed has gone over 100,000 followers (i.e., readers) some time in the last few days. Here is a graph from Twittercounter.

That’s a lot, and an achievement not to be underestimated. It has been noted by a number of sites. The excellent Simon Dickson at Puffbox suggests that this is active interest in politics:

Even if there’s no future business model, we’re looking at a phenomenal opportunity here, today. The fact it may not be here tomorrow shouldn’t stop us exploiting it while it’s there. 100,000 people have signed up - actively, voluntarily - to hear from the heart of UK government. Now they’re actually listening, what should we be saying to them?

I’m an enthusiast (and a “booster“) for political participation, and I’m with Simon on “let’s use this opportunity”. But unfortunately the interest isn’t quite as “active” as he thinks, since a signup to the 10 Downing Street Twitter Feed is now part of the account creation process on Twitter. And it is even set as an “opt-in” option.

I put out a piece on Saturday looking at Twitter growth rates on Labour List. I’ve had my own mini Twitter “lunge” over the weekend, so I’d better put my own statistics up before anyone else does.

The reason for this lunge is that I am writing an E-Book: How you can make Twitter Fly, and have done some catching up. The jump in growth is due to my following bloggers I recognise on Twitter, and “auto-followbacks” which are used by some UK new services.

Anyway, this E-Book should be coming soon …

To keep in touch …. follow me.

Derek Draper has been building up a large following on Twitter for Labour List, by following all the followers of other bloggers. It happened to Iain Dale, and yesterday I started getting reports that it is happening to me.

You can see the lunge on the graph of follower growth innthe main article when they said “Right boys, let’s do Twitter now“.

I’d like to educate the New Labour strategists that conversational politics is not about great lunges for growth as if you were some sort of cosmic Musketeer, but rather about listening carefully first.

The current figures for @derekdraper are following 2035, and being followed by 1905.

The way Twitter works when you hit 2000 is that you can only follow an extra 10% on top of the people who have followed you back. This is why people with large followings usually have a balance between the two figures.

So if a lot of us unfollow Dolly that will therefore bring the aggressive growth strategy to a dead stop - or at least until he has unfollowed us in return and found another few hundred more amenable people to grow the Labour List Twitter empire.

If you want to continue following the Labourlist Twitter Feed after unfollowing Dolly, you can do it by reading the RSS feed for @derekdraper.

I sure hope that UNITE or whoever is funding those interns has RSI insurance in place and pays overtime.

This item was first posted on the Wardman Wire.