Tonight is the TV3 leaders debate between David Cunliffe and John Key. It is the second to last debate of the election campaign. There is a clear difference between how the debate is being promoted. First lets look at how Campbell Live have promoted the debate:
Can we try and get headlines right?
TV3 have a poll out tonight. Stuff have reported on this, with a story that was obviously written from an embargoed copy of the poll. So it isn’t like it is a breaking, developing news story with changing facts and time pressures. So how do they explain getting the headline so utterly wrong? I have Stuff on my RSS reader and I also follow them on Twitter (yes I am a news junky). In both of those places the headline read:
Race to the Beehive
This election is not only the election of the selfie, but it also looks to be the game/quiz party vote finding election. I have already blogged about Ask Away and On the Fence, and there is also TVNZ’s Vote Compass project. But I have just found another one. This time from Stuff. They have taken the horse race approach to the process of how to make helping people find a party to vote interesting, entertaining and engaging.
I don’t know how long Race to the Beehive has been around, but the only reason I came across it was because I was on the More Political Headlines page trying to find an article for a university assignment. As I was scrolling down the page I came across the link for it:
Can we have more of this Raymond?
Just spotted the following tweet:
It is great to see some use of Chinese in his tweets. Not everyone who follows politicians is going to have English as their first language. One of the things taht Twitter lets candidates and MPs do is build followings in their own community and focus attention on them. So using methods that will connect with them, and make it easier for them to understand and engage is a good thing. The Maori party are using lots of Te Reo in their social media push, so why not Chinese for a Chinese MP to connect with the Chinese community?
Social Media Experiment
So yesterday I decided to undertake a little bit of an experiment on Twitter. I thought I would see how quick the parties Twitter accounts would respond to a question about policy. Now I wanted to pick a policy area that is rather obscure, but not so obscure that they wouldn’t be able to find the answer in a reasonable period of time. I am not going to comment on the content of the policy. Also a reply of “we don’t have a policy on that” would have counted as much as a link to a policy in my assessment. So the question I asked was:
I sent the same tweet to the National Party, Labour, Greens, New Zealand First, Maori Party, United Future and the Internet Party. The things I was looking to measure were if they replied, if so how quickly they replied, and the way in which they replied. As at 2130 on Monday only 4 parties had replied. UnitedFuture, Greens, Labour and New Zealand First.
