FWIW, I met the guy who does the background work on Nick’s account at Lib Dem spring conference, and he agrees with you Jon, if he’s replying or sending invites, he always makes it clear it’s from him or not from Nick. So if you get something from Nick, it’s from Nick unless it says otherwise, which is I think the right way of doing it.

“Luckily for all of us, he does not spend his days chatting away on Facebook, but deals with serious political issues such as pushing for effective action to counter the recession” sounds rather condescending towards anyone that does use social media though!

That being said, if things are being said or done in their name then they better trust absolutely who is doing it for them, as anything that is put in their name is, at least their responsibility.

Do we think that all the articles in the MSM ‘writtern’ by politicians are written by them, do we think that their speeches are written by them, of course not. So why should we be so surprised or dissapointed when their Twitter feeds and so on are not entirely self authored?

I have to say that I prefer to have more personal, self-written accounts, because this raises the credibility of the respective persons in my eyes, but in the end I am not forced to follow the tweed or blog if I am not interested in what they have to say – and I therefore just prefer to know who writes what, because it will strongly influence the way I read the news I get via these channels.

Before Nick Clegg became LD leader, he was an open and avowed fan of Facebook and ran his own profile, etc. Now, he simply doesn’t have time to do all of it, so some of the work is done on his behalf. I know he still usess it himself, but the event invites and similar are done by people he trusts.

I’m in the process of setting up Twitter accounts for my two local PPCs. I’ll do all the backend stuff, feed them to the websites, and help them map it to their Facebook profile but they’ll upate via text (ie we’re using it as an app, not an SN itself). If I update for them, I’ll probably say “Diane is” or put my name to it (or just staff).

Conversely, I know that some MPs that do use their own get reactions in which people assume it’s actually their staff doing it, not them.

Politicians have many many demands on their time, and if they find something useful but don’t have the time to dedicate to it to get it right, having someone they trust do it at least partially is fine by me. Especially in the case of a known husband/wife partnership, Graham’s always made it clear his wife is part of his team, if either Jennie or I are elected to anything, it’ll be clear that you’re getting the other as well.

A lot of politicians get complaints from others that they’re “messing about online”, I know that my personal PPC has almost zero personal time, and the local party are very insistent that I or other volunteers do her web based stuff. for every net enthusiast voter such as yourself, there’s likely a different voter that thinks the politician should be doing something else, like running a surgery or similar.