Mark Pack

“Let’s vote LD” – from the Twitter feed of George Hollingbery, the Conservative candidate for Meon Valley:  »

When I first wrote about the winners and losers from Thursday night's TV debate between Brown, Cameron and Clegg I only briefly touched on technology: Winner – TV Loser – internet The TV audience peaked at just under 10m, far more than any online audience for a UK political event. TV kept on broadcasting whilst Facebook and Tweetminster buckled under [...] »

PR Week has a story this week about the new social media guidelines for civil servants during a general election: The Cabinet Office published General Election Guidance 2010 last week for government departments, which includes details about comms activities during the general election. For the first time, the guidance outlines that 'use of Twitter may continue for [...] »

Search Engine Watch is running a series of posts during the general election from myself, Mark Hanson (Labour) and Rishi Saha (Conservatives). Here's my first post: Humour - the double-edged campaigning sword It's the rare politician who does humor well. But when it comes to online political campaigning, humor is a key factor for two reasons. First, the [...] »

I’ve used Edelman’s Tweetlevel tool for my monthly round-ups of how Liberal Democrat MPs are doing on Twitter, so the figures just outabout how the party leaders are doing as measured by that tool caught my eye. Some of the headline findings are: Gordon Brown wins Twitter war by volume Clegg is the leader with most favourability Cameron “gets [...] »

The news is out today that Twitter is going to start placing adverts at the top of search results. Although Twitter's write-up is full of phrases such as "we've resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model" and how their approach is "non-traditional" it actually bears a striking resemblance to YouTube's use of 'promoted videos': As with [...] »

Lib Dem MP for Torbay, Adrian Sanders, has joined Twitter today as @adrianfortorbay. That takes the total number of Liberal Democrat MPs on Twitter just over the half-way mark, with 32 out of 63 tweeting. You can follow them all via the list at http://twitter.com/#list/markpack/libdem-mps  »

Although I’m an enthusiast for the possibilities for sensible use of the online world in political campaigning, it doesn’t always go right for people: John Prescott’s botched attempt to encourage ‘click fraud’ on Conservative adverts – unlikely to have cost the Conservatives much, if any, money but certainly earned him a round of bad publicity for [...] »

PoliticalBetting's Morus has sensibly suggested a 'standard' set of hash tags that people can use to identify constituencies when tweeting about the general election, e.g. #Kettering for Kettering but also ones where the constituency name makes the hash tag to use less obvious (and so otherwise we'd be more likely to end up with people [...] »

A ComRes survey of 101 Parliamentary candidates “who are likely to win or retain their seats” has found very heavy use of social media. Around half the Parliamentary seats in the UK have not changed hands even once between different political parties in the last forty years, which helps explain why overall levels of take-up amongst [...] »