As news of Margaret Thatcher’s death broke yesterday lunchtime it was ITV that won the race on Twitter after the Press Association sent out its historic news flash while the BBC had the most read story.
That sparked the touch paper for more than one million mentions of the former Conservative Party leader, and three time British Prime Minister, on Twitter in the four hours after the announcement. Read More
The by-election to replace shamed Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne is heating up, and the Conservative Party yesterday came in for criticism after many of its MPs tweeted exactly the same phrase attacking the Lib Dems on housing policy in the Eastleigh constituency, and accusing their coalition partners of ‘broken promises’. Far from showing the party as united and on message, the gaffe highlighted that the Conservatives are still finding it hard to conduct a digital campaign effectively and subtly, and left them open to ridicule from political opponents.
Party political conference season has dominated UK Twitter over the last few weeks.
Followers have keenly Tweeted key quotes and messages while following the conference debates on television, while delegates shared comments and pictures from the fringe events and speeches that they attended.
It all prompted Twitter to share some of the data they had accrued over the conference season, which overall Twitter says racked up more than a million mentions. Read More
UPDATE -David Cameron last night passed the 100,000 follower milestone.
It was a quick canter to six figures for the Prime Minister who marked the occasion with his ninth Tweet and a little dig at some bookmakers.
It appears some bookies had doubted Cameron’s ability to pass the 100,000 follower mark during the week of the Conservative Party conference and have had to payout. Read More
Conservative MPs often seem like the most unnatural of Tweeters and to prove a point yesterday two Tory MPs showed how not to do social media.
Most amusingly, Alec Shelbrooke, a relative newbie to Twitter put the gaffe back into social media in a way we haven’t seen since Ed Miliband expressed his sadness in January at the death of Bob Holness the presenter of kids quiz show…’Blackbusters’.
Shelbrooke made his gaffe after announcing his appointment on Twitter as an aide to the new Northern Ireland minister Mike Penning only that’s not quite how his tweet came out. Read More
A report out today, timed to coincide with the local and London Mayoral elections, has found major flaws in the digital campaigns of the man parties. All three appear to have fallen back from the kind of work and activity that was evident in the 2010 General election.
It found that none of the parties’ websites rank before page 4 on Google for local election searches and that there were just 68 Facebook updates and 79 tweets across all three parties’ Twitter main accounts in April 2012.
The 2012 London mayoral election is less than a week away and social channels have played a large role in this campaign with both Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone’s teams making good use of it as have other candidates such as Jenny Jones from the Green’s.
With less than two days to go until the polls open and Londoner’s vote it is still to close to call although polls are predicting that the Conservatives will win against national polls and beat Labour.
This is a neat little idea, it has probably been done before, but I like it. The Labour Party has put up a Coalition advent calendar on its website where each day reveals a broken promise.
Okay, so broken promises are not what anyone wants for the holiday season, but there is no denying that it is what some are getting courtesy of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition.
Scores of government digital jobs could be lost as David Cameron plans to reorganise online activity into a single online unit under the control of Rishi Saha.
Saha is Cameron’s former deputy director of digital comms, the man behind the Tories’ digital election campaign and Webcameron, who was parachuted into the role of head of new media at No 10 after the election. Read More
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