Twitter Turnbull

Kevin 07 isn’t exactly up there with the current Obama campaign, but for people in Australia it was pretty exciting to see politics embrace the online space…even if we did have the then Prime Minister John Howard starting all his YouTube broadcasts with “Good morning”. Malcolm Turnbull is probably the most savvy when it comes to the online space and special credit goes to him for leaving a negative comment on his site when every other politician removed any trace of negatively from theirs.  

But, what’s the news? Well, Malcolm Turnbull is the first Australian politician to start using Twitter. He hasn’t been on it long and has only posted eight times, examples include “is in parliament”, “is learning about twitter”, “is in question time” and “is addressing the nation”. It wasn’t until his seventh post that he (his staff) realised that Twitter is in fact not your Facebook status update and decided to drop the word “is” from the start of every post, by post eight he/they finally twigged that Twitter is about sharing things and posted a link to his address on the financial crisis.   

Yet, a couple of things still bother me about this. The first is the fact that all the updates are done from the web, which must mean he either has a laptop connected to the net with him at all times, or he’s not actually posting himself. The second thing, he has 413 followers and isn’t following a single person – kinda missed the point there, didn’t you guys.    

MyTake – I applaud good examples of brands, companies and politicians getting involved with social media as it’s a really good way to talk to an online audience. However, the Turnbull team need to realise that social media is about a two-way conversation, not just pumping out message after message. Take a look at the Barack Obama Twitter feed, he/they are following 103,116 people. Now, while I’m sure Barack isn’t tweeting himself (of maybe his is) this is more in keeping with the Twitterverse as it’s positioned as the campaign tweeting.