Connecting with voters using online tools and social networking is a popular campaign strategy in this election. The Premier has gone with a web strategy that includes a dedicated website and blog that links to constantly updated profiles on all the major services such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Youtube. Whether you agree with her politics or not she has put a tick in every box when it comes to online strategy.
Other parties and candidates are not quite as organised and seem to either not understand or not wish to make use of the web for their campaigns. Some of the most obvious missteps are on Twitter.
LNP leader Lawrence Springborg may or may not be on Twitter, it is hard to tell when you search for his name and find two results that could easily pass for genuine.
The problem is which one (if either) is genuinely him? I sent a Tweet from our own @QldVoice Twitter account asking that very question and got a response from @TheRealBorg claiming that was the real deal. Either that is not true and is part of that person’s prank, or it is true and Lawrence has potentially discarded his 189 followers on @springborg to start up a new Twitter account with a dubious name. This is a serious election, do you really want to Twitter as “TheRealBorg”?
Other party candidates have similar problems. Erin Hall of the Greens is running for the seat of Bundaberg and (someone) has started the Twitter account @erinhallgreens.
Again this may well be the real Erin that is listed on the official ECQ candidate list, but how are we to know for sure? There are no links on the Qld Greens website to candidates’ Twitter accounts to confirm it.
While it is encouraging to see candidates from all parties reaching out to voters over the web they must also understand that on the internet your authenticity is immediately in question and must be proven. Anna Bligh gets it. Will the others catch on before election day?
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twitter.com/therealborg is him, it has been synched to his facebook etc. I don’t mind the name. And he seems to genuinely interact which is more than I can say for Anna’s. anna4qld is certainly run by staffers.
Thats good toknow, but I think it is not a good strategy for the public to have to verify his Twitter account via his Facebook account. If social media is part of his campaign strategy it needs to be anchored on the centerpiece of his web presence, which to my mind would be the LNP website or his own Springborg website.
Can we just say, @ds4seq is definitely us!
DS4SEQ
My bio is up on the Queensland Greens’ website now, complete with a link to my Twitter profile and using the same photo. Thanks for drawing my attention to it.
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