Tag: jack layton

LiberalTour (LiberalTour) is now following your updates on Twitter

I just received this email on my Blogging_Tories twitter account. Somebody in the Liberal war-room has been spending their afternoon following everyone and their brother on twitter.

At the time of this writing, liberaltour on twitter is following 1,963 people while being followed by 532 people.

Perhaps the Liberal strategy is to follow as many people as they can in order to build reciprocal followers. When people follow others on twitter, the followee receives an email indicating that they’re being followed and this gets them to reciprocate with the person who is following them. So, is the Liberal campaign building a following by blasting twitter users email inboxes with follow notices? It appears that they are succeeding somewhat as the number of people following the Liberal tour has also increased this afternoon.

At 2:45pm, liberaltour had just over 1,300 people that they were following, up to 1,600 at 3:15pm, to 1,731 at just before 5pm, and now at 1,932 (5:16pm).

Here are the current standings (as of 5:15pm on September 25 2008) among the five federal party leaders:

Account Following Followers Ratio Updates
jacklayton 909 920 1.01 84
pmharper 854 807 0.94 35
premierministre 17 58 3.41 28
liberaltour 1,962 532 0.27 36
tourneeliberal 0 10 10.0 1
gillesduceppe 171 182 1.06 69

Taking the English and French twitter feeds together for each campaign, the Conservatives have a ratio of 0.99 Following/Followers, the Liberals have a ratio of 0.28, the NDP has 1.01 and the Bloc 1.06.

Most campaigns follow as many people that follow them. However, the Liberals follow more than are followed in the twitter race.

The Liberal campaign should be careful, the folks at twitter advise

A Twitter account may be suspended for a variety of reasons. The most common of which is automated mass following or other types of spammy behavior.

Twitter is a growing social platform that all campaigns are trying to figure out during this campaign and it’s impact on Canadian politics has yet to be seen. If you like, you can follow me on twitter and check out political updates on twitter in real-time at govtweets.ca

Announcing Google Power Readers Canada

I pleased to announce today, the launch of a new way of connecting with Canada’s political party leaders and the journalists that are covering the election campaign.

I’ve been working with Google over the past couple of months on an innovative project that provides a peek into the reading material of those seeking the Prime Minister’s Office the articles that they’d like to share with you, the voter.

Late last night, our site went live and gained some very valuable real estate on the homepage of Google Canada at google.ca.

Google Power Readers Canada is the product of our work. I was able to gather Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Elizabeth May together to share articles that interest them and of course, articles they figure will interest (or should I say) entice you to vote for their candidates.

Also featured within the project are some of Canada’s top reporters that are covering the day-to-day action of the campaign. Perhaps, this will allow the “reporter’s notebook” to evolve in the way that reporters gather information and provide raw material for their readers to give them insight on the information gathering process.

You can check in what Jack Layton is reading and sharing with Google Reader, you can get a glimpse into Stephen Harper and Elizabeth May’s interests or find out what sites Peter Mansbridge frequents as he goes through his day. For example, we know that the Prime Minister is an avid hockey fan. From his shared items page we can see that the Mr. Harper is watching how the Leafs new and young talent may shape their upcoming season. The Prime Minister shares an article the Toronto Star about the Leaf’s training camp. Stephane Dion maintains his message and shows us more of his personality by linking to a Fishing Magazine in his profile. Elizabeth May has shared a Nova Scotia article from the Chronicle Herald on her platform release.

Check out Google Power Readers Canada and let me know what you think. Sign up for Google Reader yourself and share some articles with other Canadians and participate in the social media conversation for this 2008 general election. If you’re also posting your ideas, maybe Jack Layton or Stephen Harper or Kady O’Malley will share your blog post or article. I should thank the party leader’s and the journalists for taking a chance on my pitch for this project. I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to offer to Google users. This election is showing the full integration of new media within political campaigns. Google is reflecting this with Google Power Readers.

govtweets update

Both govtweets.com and govtweets.ca are humming along nicely as the websites track the real-time online conversation via twitter on the POTUS race and the Canadian federal election. Here are some stats I just compiled from the levels of activity on the both govtweets.ca and govtweets.com:

In the past 8 days on govtweets.ca, there have been 303 tweets about Stephen Harper, and 120 about Jack Layton and 92 about Stephane Dion.

Comparatively, in the last 8 days at govtweets.com, there have been 24838 tweets about “Palin”, 22869 tweets about “Obama”, 20671 tweets about “McCain” and 4051 about “Biden”.

Conclusions that we can draw from this are that McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for VP has generated much more chatter than Obama’s pick Joe Biden. Further, we can see that American politics is much more discussed globally than Canadian politics. But, I think we can also conclude that Canadians are still in the early stages of posting tweets.

And… for those of you who are wondering, I’ll be adding Elizabeth May to govtweets.ca soon.