Twitter chats for elections?

November 15, 2010 in Campaigns, Elections, Thoughts
Tags: blogging, blogs, cyber activism, FaceBook, online activism, online campaigning, political parties, political technology, politics, poltech, social media, social networking, Twitter

Twitter Chats?

The Victorian elections are the second lot of elections this year. Both elections have seen a significant increase in the use of Twitter as a means of ‘communicating’ with voters. There is a strange narrow-sightedness in this approach. Although for many people that are into their politics or are political tragics, Twitter is a perfect place for you.

At the federal election there was a big surge in the use of Twitter with a very quick moving and steady stream on popular hash tags. The Victorian election is also proving to be a partisan battleground with candidates doing less engaging and more posting their media releases, speeches and ‘pep’ tweets. (For the federal election the dominant hash tag was #ausvotes and for the Victorian election the most dominant one is #vicvotes.)

One of the features to this election on Twitter has been the ‘Twitter Chat’.

The concept is simple enough. People use an established hash tag and anyone on Twitter can participate. There are usually some ground rules established before the ‘chat’ kicks off but otherwise it’s pretty much open to the Twitterverse. Then it gets underway at the specified time and there you have it; people on Twitter interacting and exchanging tweets.

It sounds pretty sweet doesn’t it!

It would if the number of people on Twitter rivaled the number of people on Facebook. Even though there has been a statistical explosion in the growth of Twitter users, this is from a fairly low base. And there is little evidence that there is widespread up take of Twitter ‘chats’, other than among the partisan supporters and the wonks, hacks and tragics. There’s the odd journalist here and there but by and large it seems more like echo chambers; and disjointed aspects as people respond to different tweets or because of the slew of retweets.

Unfortunately since participation is only limited to those on Twitter, it isn’t as inclusive as would be holding a Facebook chat. Yet, even this would be exclusionary as not every Australian Internet user has a Facebook profile. (Roughly 59% of Australian Internet users have a Facebook profile.)

So what is there?

There is a wide selection of online technologies that allow people to conduct ‘chat’ like sessions, even online town hall-style events. Twitter and Facebook are excellent organising tools but they aren’t necessarily inclusive enough to engage the broadest audience possible, which is especially important for political and issue-based campaigns.

Instead of using what’s considered trendy by the wonks, use what is accessible to the most people.

In this way online technologies like Cover it Live provides a much better platform to run ‘chats’. It also offer a great deal of integration with Twitter; offering significant additional functionality. Cover it Live doesn’t require participants to be members in order to participate and is large enough to handle the traffic.

Cover it Live is only one example of online technologies that is more suited to ‘chats’ or online town hall-style events.

If the idea is to engage people then using Twitter for ‘chats’ is not the way to go.

Note: I’m not associated with Cover it Live and only use it as an example.