Politicians Get Fans and Followers
I heard a great NPR story yesterday (U.S.-based National Public radio) about two separate media competitions going on in Capitol hill recently. The All Tech Considered feature, “Politicians Tweet: Move Over Ashton Kutcher” states that the goal of each contest is to get as many people engaged as possible through new media outlets. Apparently 40,000 total new media people are now plugged in to the count. That’s quite a crowd!
However, they’re measuring by followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook. We think a more meaningful measure of engagement is better than just a count of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. In fact, our metrics for Twitter measure it as an “engaged user” who is any person who @ mentions the account (such as a retweet), or any person who sends a direct message to the account. This is more telling than simply counting a follower, we believe.
The winner of the House Democrats competition gets a Twitter bird trophy mount created by staffers (oh, someone send a picture, please!). The real winners are the people who can engage with constituents where they are, when they want, and in a way that meets their needs.
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