Mark Pack

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 [...] »

Changes in position and score are since March’s figures, and the same caveats apply as before to these numbers from TweetLevel (i.e. Twitter isn’t the only thing in the world, and this isn’t the only way of measuring people’s influence on / use of Twitter). New this month to Twitter are Evan Harris, Nick Harvey and [...] »

Blogging this for my convenience, but in case you find it useful too... U - post a tweet (update) R - reply to tweet / person you are viewing K - reply to all D - send direct message to author of tweet you are viewing (unlike R, this doesn't work when viewing a person) [...] »

A new academic study has plenty of important and useful findings, but none more so than the conclusion: We found that influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort. In order to gain and maintain influence, users need to keep great personal involvement. In other words, it takes time and persistence - an important point to [...] »

Welcome to 30th tweeting Lib Dem MP: @charles_kennedy You can follow them all via the Twitter list I maintain at http://twitter.com/#list/markpack/libdem-mps »

Earlier this week I penned the following guest post for the Wardman Wire: It’s become something of a truism for believers in the utility of Twitter in politics to say, “Of course it’s no good for local campaigning, but…” usually ending with a point about motivating activists or joshing with journalists. Those certainly are uses [...] »

Over in The Telegraph Labour MP Martin Salter asks the, by now, very cliched question: Just who are interested in MPs Twitterings? ... And given the prime audience for these dull statements are likely to be opposition bloggers or hostile hacks waiting for you to screw-up spectacularly, I have to ask, what’s the point? Easy [...] »

Excellent to see Evan Harris, the MP for Oxford West & Abingdon, become the latest Liberal Democrat MP on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DrEvanHarris I've also added him to my list of all Liberal Democrat MPs on Twitter, which lets you follow them all in one place: http://twitter.com/#/list/markpack/libdem-mps »