Statement Re: Politicians Using Social Media From The Co-founder Of Tweetminster.co.uk

The Hansard study; a study into how MPs use digital media to communicate with their constituents has concluded that MPs are using digital media to transmit their thoughts, but not receive. You can view the report here:

Alberto Nardelli, co-founder of www.TweetMinster.co.uk, the service that makes it easier for constituents to follow and engage with MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates using Twitter agrees that to some extent this is true, but that the report entirely ignores Twitter, a service from which many MPs are building a communicative platform with their constituents.

"Social media, as demonstrated by Barack Obama during his history-making election process can really be used in a constructive and transparent way to involve the electorate.

"The report is insightful and it's an interesting and highly recommended read. The challenge though with reporting methodology is that it tends to use yesterday's data to photograph today, and this contradicts the real-time and rapidly evolving nature of the web. It is also forced to focus on a sample population to define an entire population - yet the nature of the web is one of post-scarcity. A consequence of this is that unfortunately the report doesn't mention Twitter once.

"One in 29 MPs is Tweeting: that's about 4% of MPs. This has four key implications:

"It would possibly impact the perceived value of media by party (figure 5 on p.21 of the report) from a photo of party perception to one more faithful to the actual use of social media by MPs per party.

"Twitter would impact the (current and forecast) adoption figures in the report and it would also influence several of the mentioned fields (e.g. texting, mobile, social networking) and the rate of change (i.e. the pace of adoption). Importantly it would raise the point that there is a growing number of MPs (and PPCs) using social media not to transmit or to receive, but to engage with people, and this number is not only rising rapidly (quadruplicating in less than two months) but is evolving traffic and conversations that have the potential to change political communications in real time.

"There is of course a lot to be done, and a lot that can be done, but the real challenge is how do we collaboratively translate hints of engagement into empowerment and change?"

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