While you are right in that the official twitters have a relatively low following, some political figures, such as Gordon Brown’s wife on http://twitter.com/sarahbrown10 have loads more followers.

Sarah Brown as it stands to day have 1,118,191 followers and what is more interesting is that I actually think her twitter stream is worth following and it seems a lot of people think so too.

On the other hand I find David Miliband’s twitter rather good as well but it only has some 12k followers http://twitter.com/DMiliband which is somehwat lower than mrs Brown’s

Working previously at Fleishman-Hillard London’s digital department and dealing with many political and royalty connected stakeholders I learnt quite fast how Social Media Marketing and Politics in the UK didn’t quite like the idea of Social Media only a couple of years ago. Now I find with the advent of the ‘Obama’ sensation and seeing how even the negative sentiments online had adverse and large swings for their campaign in the USA winning the election. You can now see the shift of politicians having twitter and facebook fan pages with some PR companies managing their profile and updates (not all may I add). With digital now being such a ‘door opener’ and of which can be very targeted the UK political seen has been slow to adopt and this is mainly due to that as you know Social Media Marketing SMM is a medium that cannot be controlled and this has been the one inhibitor political parties do not like. I believe with the right Online PR and online monitoring and auditing strategy an effective SMM program can highly influence voters and online sentiment, as well as a wider audience. The key point you need to take home with politics is that not everyone is connected to the internet (just take a look at the Bureau of UK statistics on internet household connection) so Direct Mail DM and other forms of ATL advertising is still needed in the integrated marketing and communications plan to ensure you capture all constituencies and audiences…well, that’s my two cents.

Cheers,
Daniel Easterbrook

In the run-up to elections, the campaign fights between political parties always seem to get very petty. Perhaps by broadcasting everything so readily on social network sites, they will hopefully realise (or be made aware) that a smear campaign against the opposition is not the way forward and we’d much rather hear what they would do to make the country better.

Why online casinos should ignore offline design principles

– posted February 23rd, 2010 by Cory-Ann Joseph