Seven months after joining Twitter David Cameron has almost 300,000 followers and his No 10 communications team is developing a Twitter media strategy.

Downing Street is handing Twitter exclusives news stories to favoured reporters before they are issued to the rest of the media.

It is also using Twitter as a key part of its media relations to extinguish negative stories before they catch fire and gain wider momentum in the news cycle. Read More »

Good piece in the New Statesman looking at what happened on Wikipedia in the hours after the death of Margaret Thatcher was officially announced on Monday.

A battle of editors broke out on the site with almost 80 edits in the hour following the news breaking. Maybe it is no surprise that many who had previously not been heavy Wikipedia editors all wanted to jump in and add something.  Read More »

It’s truly a fascinating experience living in Singapore and seeing the world’s reaction to the joyful, sorry, very sad death of the wicked witch, sorry Margaret Thatcher.

As you can probably tell I am no hypocrite and will happily speak ill of the dead that I had no kind words for in life. If you can’t be true to yourself how can you be true to others? Death makes no difference to how you should feel about someone or something (not implying Thatcher was something but she was often call inhuman…..).

We saw yesterday how quickly news of Thatcher’s death spread on social media now see how the message materialised around the world.

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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 »

So George Osborne (@george_osborne) has chosen budget day to reach for his virtual tin hat and join the legion of tweeting politicians. The twitterverse can be an unforgiving place for politicians. Ask Ed Balls who back in 2011 tweeted his own name (presumably while searching for tweets about himself). Although his Twitter skills have since improved that’s probably his most tweeted post with 6,000 tweets two years on. Read More »

The Republican National Committee is scouring Silicon Valley in an attempt to find top talent to hire as its new Chief Technology Officer, in a clear attempt to challenge the digital supremacy of President Obama and the Democrat Party.

The GOP’s effort to use digital technology to propel Mitt Romney to the White House failed in 2012, with their voter data system ORCA crashing on polling day.

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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.

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One of the most interesting things about the US election campaign was the breadth of digital use and how the use of social media by the two parties evolved. Few stones were left unturned as the Obama and Romney campaigns progressed and even now that the election is over the Obama team continues to evolve its use of social and digital media with, for instance, its launch onto Pinterest earlier this week.

There is little the Obama team have not tried or experimented with from Tumblr, to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, blogs and Foursquare.

Then take a look back at what is happening in the UK with Labour and it seems that social and digital media campaigning appears to be going backwards. I’ve noticed a few things recently that have left me scratching my head. I saw another one yesterday and have rounded up a few things in this post. Read More »

The US election reached a frenetic climax this week, with the two main candidates leaving a huge digital footprint in their wake. From ubiquitous search-and-display advertising to virally seeded videos and social-media trends, an estimated 12% of a collective $8bn campaign spend (or $960m) has been poured into digital over the past few months.

As any technologically minded cynic will tell you, messages of empathy and conviction were crafted with greater relevancy than ever to carefully segmented audiences. For instance, micro-targeting enabled Obama’s team to direct radio ads to specific mining communities in Ohio. New data points from Facebook meant both parties were able to reach subsets of their millions of page fans with assurances on the policies that mattered most to them. Read More »

As the US election race winds down through its final hours Twitter has launched its election Twitter #Election2012 event page, which will curate Tweets from the candidates, their campaign staff, political insiders, news commentators, and government officials as the day plays out.

The 2012 US election has been dubbed the Twitter election from the start with CEO Dick Costolo making the claim back in January.

In 2004 it was blogs, in 2008 it was Facebook and 2012 has been about Twitter.  There is little doubt about that. Other platforms have made their presence felt like Tumblr and Instagram, but Twitter has made the headlines. Read More »