A response to Whale Oil

matthew

I have never claimed that social media will be a game changer. My view has always been that social media was a tool. I have not spent much time placing social media in the context of the wider campaign. That is something that will come in the next days and weeks. I am trying to stay on top of my university work at the moment, this blog has taken up more than its fair share of time lately. But I do intend to explore the role of social media in the context of the wider campaign. But just like any single form of promotion, it is not the only game in town. I know there are those out there who believe that it can be a wide-spread game changer, like the Internet Party, but I am not one of those. I don’t ever recall saying it is a game changer. The post that Whale Oil links to was meant as a warning to those who claim that numbers alone can show them that they are winning, or making progress.

 

 

Social media and the importance of issues

matthew

I am a huge fan of social media. I love how it allows candidates, MPs and parties to talk directly to voters. I love how it allows people, who would never otherwise meet, to interact with each other and to learn from each other. But it has its limitations. It is very much a self selecting environment. It is incredibly easy to end up with a timeline that is nothing but an echo chamber.

 

For a number of people on the left, and even some parties on the left. I have a feel this is what has happened. They have seen all the talk about how it is time to change the government. About how the media is biased. How about dirty politics will resonate with the electorate. As well as about many other issues. But they forget that social media in general, and Twitter in particular, are not accurate representations of the rest of the electorate. I blogged earlier about how when dirty politics was being talked about on Twitter, it wasn’t really connecting with the electorate. The articles that were being read on TVNZ, Herald and Stuff were not the ones about dirty politics. They were about the every day things that mattered to, or interested, average voters.

 

After I blogged the other day about the way the Internet Party had covered the Moment of Truth Event I got a tweet from Callum Valentine, Social Media Manager, and Wellington Central candidate, for the Internet Party. He was not happy that I had left out coverage of the fact that a number of hashtags and words associated with the Moment of Truth had ended up trending.

Banners_and_Alerts_and_Callum_Valentine_on_Twitter_____matthewjpb_proves_more__TeamKey_than_academic_by_completely_omitting__MoT_from_coverage_http___t_co_dui2WmqAWc_http___t_co_VNnRTayidb_2 Continue Reading →

Twitter Stats: 19 September

matthew

 

Most Tweets by an MP:

National: Tau Henare 185, John Key 41, Nikki Kaye 40.

Labour: Clare Curran 329, Trevor Mallard 114, David Cunliffe 77.

Greens: Metiria Turei 383, Russel Norman 195, Kevin Hague 183.

NZF: Winston Peters 65, Asenati Lole-Taylor 7, Richard Prosser 2.

Others: Peter Dunne 51, Te Ururoa Flavell 50.

Continue Reading →

Mea Culpa

matthew

I have to make a mea culpa. I made a bit of a mistake overnight. As part of tidying up my social media accounts for election day, I set my Twitter account to protected. I also made sure that my Facebook was clean of any election related stuff. But I forgot about one thing. I forgot I have a paper.il set up. So this morning it auto generated the new issue and posted it, around 0845. Thanks to Graeme Edgeler for alerting it to me while I was on the road. But this is why my Twitter account was protected, so if anything did slip through it was not able to be retweeted. Once I became aware of this I deleted the posts to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Then as soon as I was able to get access to paper.il I deleted all the content in the paper. This occurred just before 10:30. I tired to take all possible steps to make sure nothing slipped through, but I missed my paper.il. I apologise for this. I have waited until 7:20pm to make sure that this post doesn’t breach electoral law.