A common social media dilemma solved:
Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
How many accounts do you need?
Posts Tagged: Flickr
22
Mar 09
Francis Maude is wrong about Twitter and Flickr
Francis Maude
Photo from Francis Maude, Creative Commons by-nc-nd UK licence.
As news reaches us that Gordon Brown has shut down his public email address, Conservative chairman Francis Maude goes on the offensive:
Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers’ money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can’t be bothered to give out a simple email address.
The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.
Are Twitter and Flickr “digital gimmicks” that are beneath any self-respecting elected politician? Should government spend taxpayers’ money on such things? One could ask the same question about telephones, television, radio and the Internet more generally. They are communications media whose value for any particular purpose depends entirely what one does with them.
Barack Obama has amassed over 500,000 followers on Twitter and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his prospects much. (Shame he’s been too busy “leading” the “free world” to tweet lately.) Closer to home and somewhat more modestly, a man by the name of Johnson who seems to have found himself in charge of a large city happily Twitters away to a flock of 20,000 Londoners. If I remember correctly, the chap is the Conservatives’ most senior elected politician.
Further down the food chain, CllrTweeps has found 193 councillors from 129 councils on Twitter, including 54 Conservative authorities.
If social media networks are only used by politicans to broadcast top-down messages to a passive audience then they have little value beyond more traditional methods including conventional websites. But Gordon Brown’s Twitter has collected over 270,000 followers which his aides use to engage in an ongoing direct conversation with a substantial chunk of the public. If Mr Maude is right, presumably those 270,000 people — and all those thousands that follow councillors, MPs and aspiring politicians elsewhere — are wrong.
Do you think they vote, Mr Maude? Answers on a postcard (in 140 characters or fewer, please.)
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