What do you think the “Twitter effect” has been on the South African elections held today.
There has been a lot of activity on #saelection and on the public timeline on Twitter and I’d be interested to hear any anecdotes about how you followed the election using Twitter or found out about how voting was going and so on. The mainstream media organisations seem to be using it quite aggressively as are a lot of Twitter regulars.
I’d like to use the material for a little project I’m working on for Grubstreet.
So what was your experience and what are your thoughts? In the US election social media was seen as a major factor in Obama’s victory and while that is unlikely to be the case here the rush of tweets from citizens in the run-up to the election and during it must surely have had some kind of impact.
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April 23rd, 2009 at 3:21 am
MSM isn’t really using twitter “aggresively” – they just plugged their RSS feeds into it. I’d say MyNews24 is different, though – there’s a human at the helm that actually interacts.
Twitter won’t have any effect on voting numbers, but it will provide updates a lot faster than MSM journalists can. Especially since there’s still a few of us awake
For instance: http://dcit.co.za/277 (Tweeted here: http://twitter.com/woganmay/status/1590144499 )
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 am
Helen Zille and the DA newsroom used Twitter quite a bit to keep voters updated and she actually answered something I asked her on Twitter (although it probably wasn’t her).
What really impressed me was the DA website set up for interaction with the voters (Contribute to change) which is a whole social networking thingy, complete with a full-blown version of Wordpress (which allows individual blogs for all members) very neatly and fully integrated. That must have cost a pretty penny!
Zille also has an eye for IT aesthetics obviously
http://img.skitch.com/20090423-teps8js2xm1k8b5×7mc8g7byak.jpg
April 24th, 2009 at 4:39 am
@Chris It’s Buddypress, and it’s completely free (I’ve set one up myself). Still, it’s more than any other political party has done…
LOL @ that photo! Obviously, Zille gets it on a whole new level