Trevor Mallard is the Labour MP for Hutt South. Trevor is a former Minister of Education, he was also a key member of Labours strategy team during the last election. Trevor has been on twitter for a while. He has sent over 12,500 Tweets, follows just over 3000 people and has over 5300 followers. So he has a solid base on Twitter.
This afternoon it looks like Trevor fell foul of one of the many spam operations going around on Twitter. It is nice to know it is not just the average user who has this issue.
Trevor can be extremely forceful with his views, both in person and on twitter. The thing that I appreciate about Trevor on Twitter is that in a lot of cases, instead of just replying to a tweet with his comment, he will retweet it with his comment attached. Which is great if you don’t follow the other person, it means you get to see the tweet, and may find a new person to follow. I wish more MPs, and more Twitter users in general would do this!
Trevor obviously has no issue retweeting those from both sides of the political divide when it enables him to make a dig at someone.
Trevor obviously grasps the visual aspect of Twitter, as well as the advantage to tagging other accounts in on the Tweets. However I will make the same comment about some of Trevor’s photos that I made about some of John Key’s images. They are not really up to the standard I would expect to see on the Twitter feed of a senior MP of one of the two major parties. To be blunt, I would expect better images from any MP. If you are an MP or a professional using Twitter and you want to use photos. Use good photos. If you don’t know what a good photo is, talk to someone who does.
What is obvious from Trevor’s Twitter account is that he does love Wainuiomata. He is a great promotor of the area. However there is room for improvement in promoting local businesses in his electorate.
The other thing that makes Trevor an interesting and fun person to follow is his self deprecating sense of humour that is obvious in some of these Tweets.
It will be interesting to watch Trevor during the run up to the election and see how he behaves. Will he try and stick to message and help his party, or will he go off and wage another duck vs whale type campaign like last time? Or should we be expecting something else?
