The Vancouver Sun’s Digital Life offers an article by Gillian Shaw in which she compares the various Liberal leadership candidates according to their popularity in social media. While I blogged about this before Shaw started writing her columns, I adhere to the belief that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and will let it go at that. But if I were keeping score, I’d say 1 for me 0 for Shaw.
At the time I wrote my blog, however tongue-in-cheek it was, I said that if I used popularity and engagement in Twitter as a predictor of the Liberal leadership race, Coleman would be the winner, if of course he decided to run.
He didn’t.
Shaw is using Sysomos, a social media monitoring tool not unlike Radian6, to provide information on which of the candidates has more followers, more frequency and so on. I used a simple comparison of # of Twitter followers and a subjective view of how interesting their Tweets were and how engaged they seemed to be in social media. So Shaw gets the point here, making us even.
Shaw’s thesis after following the candidates for a month is that “none of the leadership candidates seems to be a runaway success.”
I’m not surprised in the least. It’s not like one of the wanna be leader’s Tweets or Facebook entries is going to go viral. Let’s take one of Falcon’s recent Tweets to prove the point: “Great mtg w/BC Cattlemen’s Assoc and MLA Terry Lake. Terry is a tireless advocate for BC’s ranchers!” Yawn.
It’s not like the politicians are particularly entertaining or amusing.Any of their tweets proves this point.
It’s not like a lot of people came out to vote in the last election. And it’s not like anyone other than a Liberal member has a say as to who is going to win the leadership challenge anyways. So unless all of their followers will be voting come February, social media popularity is a moot point.
Like the SkyDiggers said…”There’s nothing as hot as a slow burning fire.” If you’re getting 1000′s of Twitter followers in a matter of days or even weeks, and you’re not Oprah or Justin Beiber, then in all likelihood, you’re using some kind of spambot crappola and the followers aren’t genuine anyways.
Since I’m not a celebrity, I’ve been building up my Twitter following slowly and steadily, through, of all things — engagement. I haven’t tried to get people to follow me. What I have tried to do is to use the medium as I believe it was intended — to share information, to engage, to converse, to learn. I bet if you asked Falcon, Clark, Abbott, Stilwell or De Jong why they’re using Twitter or Facebook, they’d have a different POV.
Still they’re trying and all deserve credit for that. And if they’re smart, when the leadership race is over, they’ll continue to actively engage in social media so when the province-wide election takes place, they have a following and won’t have to build one again.