From St.Catharines Standard – April 13, 2011
By Grant LaFleche, Standard Staff
In a lot of ways, Twitter is a universe of instant gratification. Hard-core users have mastered an arcane skill of conversing in 140 characters or less. Often taking part in the conversation requires a person to respond to others right away. Wait too long and whatever it was you might have said gets buried in the constantly scrolling Twitter feed.
So when political candidates don’t answer voters’ questions right away, the denizens of the Twitterverse get impatient.
“I posted a question to the local candidates and it took (Liberal Andy) Gill a couple of days to get back to me,” said Robin McPherson, a local social media strategy consultant.
She had asked the candidates if they could follow five campaign rules that were proposed by CBC commentator Rex Murphy.
“So when Gill replied, he said yes he could. When (Conservative) Rick Dykstra finally replied a few days later, he asked me if I could run them down for him because he didn’t have time to watch the video I had linked,” McPherson said. “Yeah, I was a little annoyed.”
Social media has been touted as a way to reach voters, organize supporters and generally revolutionize political campaigning since Barack Obama used it to great effect during his successful 2008 U.S. presidential run.
Yet, no Canadian politician has ever used social media — from Twitter to Facebook to Youtube and beyond — anywhere near as well as Obama did.
“They don’t use it very well, frankly,” McPherson said. “I’m not sure they really understand how to use it effectively.”
In the St. Catharines riding, all the candidates from the major parties are on Twitter, which is the dominant form of social media employed so far in the campaign, said Doug Hagar, a Brock University research assistant who studies social media in politics.
He said the overall use of social media vastly exceeds any prior Canadian campaign, at the local and national level and probably in the upcoming provincial election. But how the candidates and party leaders use their websites leaves him a little cold.
“It’s most press release style — putting out parts of the party platform and talking points,” he said.
“There is not a lot of discussion going on.”
McPherson said Twitter users want to engage in a level of conversation. They don’t want to be talked at, which is what the tweeting of links to party platforms is doing. They want to be talked to.
“What they want is to exchange ideas. For the most part right now, that is not really happening,” she said.
Hagar and McPherson said of the local candidates, Conservative incumbent Dykstra has engaged in the most conversation with Twitter users. Gill and Green Party candidate Jennifer Mooradian have also responded to questions from users, while local NDP candidate Mike Williams is a newcomer to the site with a mere 18 tweets to his name as of midday Tuesday.
For the most part, tweets from candidates are either links to official party platforms or updates on what they are doing, mostly along the lines of informing voters when they are returning to door-knocking after taking a lunch break.
“People will tune out a little bit,” McPherson said. “They want to be involved in a discussion, not just reading press releases. I think part of the problem is that the people running the campaigns are still skeptical about social media.”
Hagar said it’s clear Canadian federal candidates generally don’t really understand what do to with social media.
“People want a degree of personal interaction. You have to post things that are interesting. Use a little bit of humour, show people who you really are,” he said. “Right now, you aren’t really getting anything different (from what) you find on the party websites.”
While something like Twitter might not replace traditional door-knocking and brochures in the mail, McPherson said candidates are passing up on reaching a potential pool of voters.
In Niagara, as much as a quarter of a million people use Facebook, with somewhat fewer regularly using Twitter, McPherson said. Nevertheless, if a Twitter strategy was properly employed, a candidate could reach 1,000 voters, she said.
In a close local race, 1,000 votes could be the difference between a seat in the House of Commons and being a statistic in the Elections Canada database.
glafleche@stcatharinesstandard.ca
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