On election day in South Australia, I take a last-minute look at what political candidates have been doing on Twitter.

This is a follow up to my ‘Politicians and Twitter’ blog a few weeks ago ...

Premier Mike Rann hasn’t tweeted for past two days. Too much to do, to tweet? I would’ve thought using your own direct broadcast channel and conversing with the electorate was more important now, than it ever was. Would have loved to see tweets from the Premier sharing insights like:

• What’s it like, the night before the election?
• How does he feel, going into the polling booth?
• Is he glad election day has finally come?
• What’s his message to the electorate today?
• What party does he have planned tonight? What happens if he loses?

The Premier’s Twitter account did contain a few Twitpics recently – not terribly insightful – and he also attempted to start a #premiermikerann hashtag that didn’t turn out to be too popular.

Opposition Leader and Premier-hopeful Isobel Redmond hasn’t tweeted for the past three days, and the last tweet seems to be clarifying a policy. In fact, her last few tweets are attempting to clear up what’s she’s called “incorrect” media reports. Not a good look to leave on your Twitter page. Why not some positive announcements and tweet interaction with your voters, going into election day?

On the plus side, Ms Redmond did respond to some tweet queries from others, and used the #saelection hashtag – fantastic way to be part of the community stream on the topic. (I’d love to see her team load a branded Twitter background for her, though. You’ve got to use every opportunity to brand yourself, people!)

Michael Wright continues to be largely a conduit for the Premier’s tweets (why bother – I guess he’s playing it safe?); Mark Parnell hadn’t tweeted for the past four days.

Jamie Briggs has been tweeting regularly throughout the election period, including today, commenting on a “great feeling”. He’s had a consistent tweet theme : “rann's time is up and redmond is ready” .. did you notice?

Best examples include Kat Nicholson for Gamers4Croydon regularly tweets, replies, uses hashtags and posts twitpics. And Dr Jane Lomax-Smith continues to communicate to a high standard, today sending out a few tweets about what she’s doing on election morning and feeling “buoyed by level of support today” .

What I’d like to see happen on Day 1 of the new government:
The communications team sits down and starts to work out how to best use social media to engage with the people who put them there.

What have you seen happening on Twitter during the #SAelection?

Businesses and not-for-profits are increasingly adopting social media as part of their communications programs.

This isn’t a blog about how ‘social media has become mainstream’. What I do want to ponder is: who’s best suited to manage these social media strategies?

Is it an organisation’s:
• marketing department
• public relations team
• advertising team or
• (if an organisation is lucky enough to have it) its digital marketing department
• a multi-disciplinary team?

I tweeted the question recently and received a variety of responses, but little agreement. It reminds me a little of the great website debate of 10 years ago: who owns the company website? Corporate? IT? Marketing? [Sadly, some companies still haven’t resolved this.]

So where does social media sit? This is a real issue for me.

I work within the public relations field, and the social media campaigns I help manage often delve into the world of marketing. I’ve got a BA in Journalism and Masters in Communication Management ... I don’t have the energy to become a marketer, too. But I know the marketing discipline would add definite strengths to some social media projects.

But do marketers care enough about regular two-way conversations with stakeholders? Probably not as much as PR bods, who are charged with caring about what all audiences say about their clients, wherever they say it.

Social media and PR work well together.

A PR professional can see where social media fits within a business’s overall communications strategy. Good PR bods recognise the need for two-way communication within an organisation, and social media is today’s key to two-way communication tool. PR professionals are also focused on outcomes, on reaching the right audiences in the right place, with the right message. We won’t play with social media just for the sake of it.

As Lee Hopkins has said (and said often), it’s about strategy. Who’s best able to steer your social media strategy for you? It’s not just about opening a Facebook page, boosting membership numbers, and blasting followers with regular marketing messages. There’s got to be a rhyme and reason to all this. If you’re not asking that question yet .. believe me, your followers soon will. Consumers are becoming more savvy and selective: they won’t follow everyone forever.

There needs to be a long term view. What’s going to happen to that Facebook page in a year, in two years? What does the organisation want to achieve? What does it believe in? What type of relationship does it want with its stakeholders?

New ‘Social media specialists’ who are setting up shop specifically to push organisations onto platforms like Facebook need to take a chill pill. They’re membership factories ... with a finite membership. It’s a recipe for disaster.

IN SUMMARY: social media is turning into a specialist role for people with multi-disciplinary skills. The ones who rise to the top will be those who respect other specialities, ask for advice, and follow a STRATEGY.

I was staring at my PC screen recently.

Staring at an owl wearing a hard hat. Hootsuite was down for maintenance and it was darn annoying.

It brought home the fact that I rely on Hootsuite a great deal to manage multiple social media accounts. Many of us do it now – we’re using Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Facebook, YouTube, FlickR, YouTube, Blogger – for business.

When our telephone line goes down, we call our phone provider. If the electricity fizzles out, we call the building manager. If the newspaper doesn’t get delivered to the office on time, we can call the newsagent and ask what’s going on. They’re all being paid by us. They’ve got service agreements with us. And there are consequences to those services being unavailable.

But when happens when our free online tools fall over?

Not much.

Services like Hootsuite, quite rightly, do not promise they’ll always be there for you. In its terms, owner Invoke Media states in part:

“Your use of the Service is at your sole risk. The service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis ... Invoke Media does not warrant that (i) the service will meet your specific requirements, (ii) the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, (iii) the results that may be obtained from the use of the service will be accurate or reliable, (iv) the quality of any products, services, information, or other material purchased or obtained by you through the service will meet your expectations ...” http://hootsuite.com/terms

But it’s no fickle matter if these services are unavailable. Increasingly, we’re relying on free social platforms as main communication channels. We’ve all read about major companies like Pepsi, Coca Cola, Ford and Holden devoting more resources to sites like Facebook, rather than official sites. When these online tools are gone, it’s an interruption to our services.

Imagine a world where social media is ‘taken away’ (hideous, isn’t it?) The Social Media God decides the experiment is over, and we all need to go back and play on our standard dotcoms.

Boom! In an instant, you’ve lost your thousands of Fans – their names, locations, likes and dislikes. You’ve lost all the comments you’ve been gathering, all the interaction you’ve built up. You’ve lost photos and videos. Not to mention search engine listings.

That’s why it’s important to back up that information. How many of us do that? When was the last time you archived a social media account? (I’m making a mental note ...)

What better time to take a look at state politicians’ tweets than now - at the official beginning of the South Australian election period?

It’s fantastic that some pollies have delved into social media, using platforms like Twitter. This means they get it – right?

Er ... maybe not.

Taking a cursory look at some SA politicians tweets, it appears they use Twitter as a broadcasting platform rather than as an opportunity for conversation. They broadcast messages about themselves and only seldom do they publicly reply to followers, or retweet others.

Now, I’m not sure whether the pollies are only direct replying (DM) to their constituents. So I can’t categorically say they’re using one-way communication on Twitter. But to the general public, that’s how it appears.

This means most SA politicians haven’t really grasped what Twitter is about – that it’s a conversation. It’s not an opportunity for them to spout their views / tell us where they are / have a go at the opposition and then log off.

Let’s look at a few examples:
http://twitter.com/premiermikerann
There’s very little two-way interaction from South Australia’s current Premier. His Twitter account is full of paragraphs about what he’s doing, but you have to trawl thoroughly to see a single Reply to anyone else.

If you use search.twitter.com and look for @premiermikerann you will see that others are tweeting the Premier, asking him questions and sharing their opinion. Does he respond directly and privately? Or not at all? Who knows?

http://twitter.com/isobelredmond
The would-be Premier and Leader of the SA Liberal Party appears to be relatively new to Twitter. Similarly to Mike Rann, there is little interaction and conversation with followers on her Twitter account. And again, if you go to search.twitter.com it’s easy to see that people are asking her questions and trying to interact.

The following MPs have scant public interaction with followers on Twitter (at least over past few days .. I have not done an exhaustive search over the week):

http://twitter.com/MichaelWrightMP
Few replies – he does retweet the Premier quite often.

http://twitter.com/MarkParnellMLC
I had to travel past 23 tweets before I saw a reply – and that was to a Senator.

http://twitter.com/DavidWinderlich
At least he’s trying to start a hashtag - #davidteam . This MP interacts at least within every 10 tweets, but doesn’t always appear to be David tweeting, as it’s been written in the third person, ie

"... thanks mate, check out David's website at www.davidwinderlich.com thanks for your support #DavidTeam"

Michael Pengilly has protected his tweets. http://twitter.com/MichaelPengilly What’s up with that? Is he following only? Why use Twitter if you don’t want to chat with others in a public forum? (ps Michael, change your colour design! Ouch).

And now we come to the exception to the rule – Dr Jane Lomax Smith, tourism and education minister, who’s been using Twitter for quite some time. http://twitter.com/DrJaneLS

Dr Lomax-Smith often responds and interacts with followers, shares more personal information, (such as what she’s looking forward to for dinner tonight), funny anecdotes and blunders and shows personality:

“ Can't stand reading tweets from fitness fanatics about rides runs and swims while bothered by calf injury and sulking around house”.

Of course, she also talks politics and spruiks what her government is doing. But she gets points for replying to followers and being real. Dr Lomax-Smith needs to grab her colleagues and run a Twitter workshop.

What have you noticed from SA pollies on Twitter? I’m especially interested to know if they’re direct-replying rather than publicly replying.

If they are DM-ing, why? If they have something to say to a constituent, surely they want to share that information with all of us?

Note: since publishing this blog, I've received numerous tweets to say Premier Mike Rann used to interact and reply to followers, but this appears to have dropped off during recent weeks. [23 Feb 2010.]

On the back of all commentary about “the internet killing mainstream media ...”

.. consider how Twitter encourages live TV viewing.

Have you ever sat back in front of the tele, relaxing in your favourite armchair, with your mobile phone open to Twitter?

If you answered Yes, you’re not the only one.

I’m increasingly enjoying watching live TV with a gang of friends – on Twitter.

While some people may have been doing this for some time, it only recently kicked in for me during My Kitchen Rules, the Channel 7 ‘reality’ series pitting passionate cooking couples against each other. I’ve been enjoying tweeting comments about the show and sharing views with others. We tweet about what the Kitchen couples are like, how the food looks, and how hot the celebrity chefs are. All brought together under a hash tag (one of the superior evolutions of Twitter).

On any given night of the week, you’ll find similar hash tag debates bringing Australian lounge rooms together: #spicksandspecks #cougartown #lost and much more. Longer show titles get a shortened version, such as #mkr for My Kitchen Rules or #sytycd (So You Think You Can Dance).

So, what are TV stations doing to capitalise on this?

I must admit I was surprised to see Daryl Somers gloating about Hey Hey It’s Saturday being a trending topic on Twitter some months ago, when Hey Hey had a comeback special. Still not sure he knows what Twitter is ... but besides this, have you seen many TV corporation references to Twitter?

Free to air television is finding its environment increasingly competitive, with audiences being pulled toward downloading content, DVDs, and viewing on demand without commercials in general.

Now, its strength just may be in encouraging audiences to watch alongside pals online as the show airs in real time, enjoying the show in an interactive forum they’ve never been able to experience before.

Last night, I tweeted about My Kitchen Rules for the entire program. And you know what’s really interesting for TV channels – and their advertisers? I tweeted about the commercials during the show. So did my tweet pals. We critiqued the commercials, the advocates featured in them, the creative used and how we felt about them.

There’s some real audience connection, market research and advocacy going on.
Let me know if you’ve seen TV stations encouraging social media take up anywhere.

Interesting articles:

Live TV's Alive as Ever, Boosted by Social Media

TV and Social Media Engagement

We’ve all heard this maxim about websites: you’ve got less than 10 seconds to impress (or is that 6 seconds, or 3? It all depends on which blog you read). But have you ever stopped to think that websites aren’t alone in this?

First impressions count. We all have seconds to make an impact before a) interest wanes b) a person makes assumptions about you or c) a person falls in love with you(according to Hollywood).

This maxim occurred to me again recently, as I wandered in and out of clothing stores. It took only seconds for me to recognise whether a store had any merchandise that appealed to me.

Sure, I might politely wander around for a few more seconds, say hello to the shop assistant, touch some fabric - but I would know almost immediately whether I was going to spend any money there.

On websites, when visitors leave quickly it’s often called your site’s “bounce rate”. How long they stay can be referred to as a site’s “stickiness”.
I haven’t worked in the retail sector, but I’d love to know if there is research on their stores’ stickiness. I’m sure there is.

In supermarkets, they do try to influence this. They stock the essentials right at the back of the store, ensuring you spend more time there as you traverse your way down the aisles. (Think about where the milk, eggs and bread is stored in your local supermarket).

Websites clearly shouldn’t be burying their useful information. But what lessons can websites take from supermarkets – if any? “Dressing your storefront” to appeal to customers is an obvious one.

Websites have one clear advantage over the physical stores. Website analytics. It’s easy to show how many users leave after a few seconds. I wonder if shop assistants are taking any notes?

Have you ever worked in retail? Any stories to share?