No posts at all! Maybe they just wanted to grab the name? And yet they followed me back (as they have with most of their followers).

God this fair trade organic banana is **** . Can I have a slave-grown chemically-treated genetically modified one?

in a public debate they would be removed as well!

Essentially anyone who is a sensible and good politician offline can be a good and constructive one online as well. It’s not that complicated… and Twitter is not the problem.

However – what I’m worried about is all the bad press Twitter has been getting in political circles. A couple of candidates have gotten into trouble by tweeting the wrong thing. From the perspective of a voter – this is great. We get to know what candidates really think about controversial issues. However… I think it scares politicians and puts them off using Twitter.

@Matt – what you outline might be better than nothing, and that’s the point I am essentially raising. But there is a point where nothing at all is better than doing it poorly… and I’m trying to find where that point is.

As for time – I just don’t buy that argument. Twitter is something you can fit in between everything else, if you want to. The time argument holds for blogging, but not for Twitter. You needed to have equipped your candidate with a smart phone – then it would have worked?

Yes, it’s best if a politician has an account, uses it themselves, and talks to people. But use of Twitter is the same as any other thing; it’s got to be something you vaguely enjoy to actually be good at it and make it worth it.

If it’s not something you actively enjoy doing, better to do something equally constructive with your time; let’s face it, politicians are generally hard pressed for time generally. For thee and me, the learning curve for Twitter was almost non existent; you just use the site/client, and it does what you expect. For someone not used to web stuff, perhaps someone not convinced it’s a good idea in the first place?

I set my PPC up on Twitter during the campaign, her stream consisted of two types of update; her tweets via SMS, and updates from the news website/campaign blog. She tried to get the web interface, but never did quite understand what was going on. When anyone asked her a question, either I or Jennie replied; we know we picked up voters and supporters (including two members) as a result of our efforts, so it was worth it.

But for her? Full time job, children, twon councillor, chair of school governors and candidate for GE in a 3-way marginal. She’s not a techy, not a regular online user, still checks her email by DLing it, reading it offline, then sending it all later. We were better off with her doing stuff she’s good at (like face to face contact) than spending time on Twitter.

If elected, I suspect I’d have given her a crash course in actual usage, reading, replying, etc. But I suspect a lot of the monitoring would’ve had to be done by office staff/volunteer.

Lots of people use Twitter, partially, as an RSS reader; if I didn’t use DW I suspect I’d do the same. In fact, large numbers of people still have no idea what RSS is. Check your stats. Check the stats of your clients. What proportion of non-search traffic is from an RSS reader, compared to other sources, incoming links, or just direct requests?

We got as much traffic from Twitter as from any other source except Google for the campaign site. People retweeted our “website update” posts.

Yes, you could trweet between meetings, in the back of the car, etc. Or you could read correspondence, reply to emails, etc. All of these would be useful activities.

I, personally, am much more inclined to support a twitterer than a non-twitterer, if I actually like them. But thee and me are a minority; most voters, still, have either not heard of Twitter, or have a basic idea of what it is.

If you enjoy using it, fine, but if not? Have an account, get it monitored, feed stuff from elsewhere. That is better than nothing.

Accounts like that are just newsfeeds, and their subscribers pretty much knew that when they followed. Floella Benjamin has never replied to anyone, and is following 8 people. Doesn’t stop her being popular, and doesn’t mean her use of Twitter is a waste of time. Sure, I’d like to see her replying, talking to people, etc. Maybe when she takes her seat, she will.

But I have no problem with her using it as a tool.

I can think of at least one very good reason to use Twitter as an extra RSS feed (although I admit this is something which most politicians who’ve hooked their blogs up to Twitter probably don’t do) – and that is hashtags.