26 responses so far ↓

• 1 IanS // Sep 7, 2014 at 10:03 pm

  Wow… Vision’s clearly in the lead when it comes to the number of tweets.

• 2 Bill Lee // Sep 7, 2014 at 10:26 pm

  Mayor Gregory since Sept 2008 has made: tweets 2,622; Photos/Videos 149; And Mayor G is Following 1,525; Has Followers 44.8K; ( of which 12 were determined to be false. MtnbVan wrote: ” Twitter Audit evaluates whether a user’s followers are fake or real. audit of Mayor (2012) showed over 12K fake followers)”

  How many bought from China?

  (See counting headers at https://twitter.com/mayorgregor [ Don’t join twitter, no need ] )

  How many tweet written/composed by staff instead of his Hirsuteness?

• 3 Jacquie Miller // Sep 7, 2014 at 11:36 pm

  Just a correction RE Adriane Carr’s social media – her Facebook profile has over 4,800 friends 🙂

  https://www.facebook.com/vote.carr/friends

• 4 Threadkiller // Sep 8, 2014 at 12:33 am

  I don’t do social media. Would someone who does kindly indicate if any of this has any meaning and if so, why?

• 5 Raymond Tomlin // Sep 8, 2014 at 6:45 am

  Naheed Nenshi, Calgary’s Mayor, has 182,615 followers on Twitter.

  Makes our local candidates seem like pikers. Just sayin’.

  @Threadkiller. When Nenshi first ran for office in 2010, he had 400 Twitter followers, and arising from a weekly column he’d published for a couple of years in the Calgary Herald, sat at 8% in the polls. At the end of the campaign, Nenshi had 41,000 Twitter followers, and on election day garnered 39.6% of the vote. According to Stephen Carter, his campaign manager, Nenshi’s Twitter followers became “Team Nenshi”, and played a pivotal role in propelling him to victory on election night.

  A Globe and Mail story reported that Nenshi “communicated directly with supporters and critics alike on Twitter,” while his “tweeps” helped him pick his 2010 victory tie. Macleans called him the social media mayor.

  Twitter allows voters to communicate directly, online, with a candidate (perhaps less true of Gregor Robertson than the other candidates, as the Vision Vancouver communications team reportedly tweets out on the Mayor’s behalf — not so with the NPA’s Kirk LaPointe, though, who’s responsible for all his own tweets).

  For those of us who live online, Twitter has emerged as the democratic engagement tool of our new age.

• 6 Threadkiller // Sep 8, 2014 at 8:20 am

  @Raymond Tomlin:
  For those who think that serious issues can be properly addressed in 140 characters, I guess Twitting is the way to go. And, of course, I understand that like Facebook, it’s great way to sell products. Meanwhile, we non-twits, dinosaurs that we are, still doggedly cling to our pathetically outmoded old methods of comment and communication. Incidentally, “live online” is a thoroughly oxymoronic turn of phrase…

• 7 boohoo // Sep 8, 2014 at 8:45 am

  @6

  I was slow to adopt, but twitter is a great way to get a message across. It can be a platform for further discussion, getting info out, etc.

  It is not a platform for properly addressing issues, but a place to discuss them and engage people that might not otherwise come out to typical engagement events.

  Of course, it’s full of idiots and ridiculous people saying asinine things, but that’s true everywhere in any mode of communication.

• 8 Julia // Sep 8, 2014 at 9:45 am

  either Gregor does not do his own social media, or he is playing with his phone during council meetings or is not getting any work done. I give that a fail X 3

• 9 Dan Cooper // Sep 8, 2014 at 5:16 pm

  The Work Less Party has 71 followers on Facebook. And according to its Facebook event page, The Work Less Party Party had 1.1 thousand people in attendance last year. Thus, if we are considering political viability by social media presence, obviously the Work Less Party is a major contender.

  Harkening back to @Raymond Tomlin above, this raises the question (to me anyway!): Did Nenshi win primarily because he had lots of followers on twitter, or did he gain lots of followers on twitter primarily because he was winning by running a great campaign all around?

• 10 teririch // Sep 9, 2014 at 12:42 pm

  It is hard to gage as Robertson and Vision have been around for 7+ long years – so well established.

  Whereas many of the other parties have just announced their candidate slates.

• 11 teririch // Sep 9, 2014 at 1:11 pm

  @Bill Lee #2:

  Perhaps Robertson & Vision took advantage of this offer: via Twitter:

  Good news! Twitter Followers now on sale! Buy now, Only $59 for 20,000 Followers!! click : http://ow.ly/yXwik#now

• 12 Jenables // Sep 9, 2014 at 1:21 pm

  Well, vision has 15 subscribers to their youtube channel. But the videos are very…. Uh, targeted.

• 13 Bill // Sep 9, 2014 at 1:28 pm

  @boohoo #7

  “It is not a platform for properly addressing issues, but a place to discuss them”

  So you can’t properly address an issue in 140 characters but you can discuss them properly in 140 characters. Not sure of what distinction you are making here (and you weren’t limited by 140 characters!). Twitter is just a way for people to feel they are engaged in an issue without expending any effort to actually understand the issue. Very superficial and lazy but not atypical.

• 14 Quatchi // Sep 9, 2014 at 1:40 pm

  @threadkiller #4

  You DO, in fact, ‘do’ social media. You’re doing it right now!

  Congrats!

• 15 boohoo // Sep 9, 2014 at 1:55 pm

  @13

  “So you can’t properly address an issue in 140 characters but you can discuss them properly in 140 characters. Not sure of what distinction you are making here”

  You really can’t see the distinction between addressing an issue and discussing it?

  Oy.

  “Twitter is just a way for people to feel they are engaged in an issue without expending any effort to actually understand the issue. Very superficial and lazy but not atypical.”

  There are these things called ‘links’. Often people discuss something on twitter and ‘link’ to other sites where you are free to write as many characters as you want. There you can learn, ignore, do as you please and perhaps return to twitter to discuss more, reply more fully on your own blog and ‘link’ it on twitter again, set up a time to meet in person, or a whole host of other things.

  Your inability to understand or ignorance of something does not invalidate it.

• 16 Chris Keam // Sep 9, 2014 at 2:56 pm

  Succinct and visible

  Some find risible

  But history demonstrates

  Impacts measurable

  With word counts miniscule

  Burma Shave

• 17 Bill Lee // Sep 9, 2014 at 3:24 pm

  Forwarded from a twitter feed of an ex-Vancouverois.

  5 Crazy Ways Social Media Is Changing Your Brain Right Now,
  by @AsapSCIENCE ~
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HffWFd_6bJ0

  Video, (pardon their initial commercial which you can easily skip), 3 minutes 16 seconds of whiteboard animation, (thankfully with subtitles, so you can watch with sound off)
  Published on Sep 7, 2014

  ASAPScience is from Toronto

• 18 Bill Lee // Sep 10, 2014 at 11:56 am

  Mildly related to Madame Bula’s social media reading-of-the-entrails

  Canadian embassy’s social media ‘fans’ in China mostly zombies [ 1200 words ]
  by Nathan VanderKlippe BEIJING — The Globe and Mail
  Published Wednesday, Sep. 10 2014, 3:00 AM EDT
  Last updated Wednesday, Sep. 10 2014, 5:15 AM EDT

  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-embassys-social-media-fans-in-china-mostly-zombies/article20506692

  …The Canadian government says it hasn’t paid for the fakes and doesn’t know who has.

  But there are a lot of them. An analysis of the embassy’s website, using publicly available Chinese software, estimates that just 12.9 per cent of its 1.1 million followers are real. That number is likely low. But it’s clear that many are, like Hongmingzi520 and User512237168, almost certainly fake – or, in the preferred appellation of Chinese Internet experts: zombies. (That blue-sky picture used by User512237168? It is the exact image used on the embassy’s own Weibo.)

  Zombie accounts aren’t unique to the Canadian embassy, nor even to China. On Twitter, according to a testing tool run by Socialbakers, 66 per cent of the accounts following Barack Obama are empty or suspicious. For Stephen Harper, it’s 42 per cent….

  [ more]

• 19 brian. // Sep 10, 2014 at 4:29 pm

  Everyone here saying social media doesn’t matter is getting news and discussing it with strangers (or near strangers, if you go to the meetups) on social media.

• 20 Jeff Leigh // Sep 10, 2014 at 5:42 pm

  I thought exactly the same thing back at post #4. Threadkiller said he didn’t do social media, but he said it in a comment that he posted here on social media.

• 21 Victor // Sep 11, 2014 at 11:27 pm

  Maybe the other candidates need to hire 24 people in their Communications Dept so they have more people to Tweet and spend time Facebooking for them. That would even the playing field I am sure!

• 22 gman // Sep 13, 2014 at 2:38 pm

  I had a good laugh when I read LaPointe on things Ive learned.
  5. You know something’s fishy on Twitter when a message from an “undecided voter” comes to you ReTweeted from a Californian real estate agent, a New York public relations manager, a U.S. gun shop owner, a Utah priest, an Abbotsford pole dancer, and someone named baileyboobopperoo among hundreds of other non-locals. Hello, bots.
  And #9 was also pretty funny.

  9. We have 23 public relations employees at City Hall and 33 municipal gardeners for our 230 parks. Cuts six years ago when Vision arrived have never been restored. We are spending more and more time talking green and less and less time delivering green.

  http://thevancouveriwant.ca/2014/09/11/things-learned-campaign-vol-7/

• 23 gman // Sep 13, 2014 at 3:25 pm

  Looks like we may have to upgrade those numbers from #9.
  http://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/cov-hiring-communications-manager/

• 24 Bill Lee // Sep 13, 2014 at 5:35 pm

  RE: gman // Sep 13, 2014 at 2:38 pm #21

  And if LaPointe/NPA, in that blog posting, is somehow blaming Vision for the failure of the Punjabi Market, why not also mourn the more than dozen empty or closing-out stores in Kerrisdale. Certainly that is NPA territory.
  Even the venerable last fish store, Mcfarlane’s Fish has had to move from Kerrisdale to the remote Mackenzie Heights village (at 33rd), which is no Eppendorf.

  Demographic changes, and developer “scorched earth” retail policy have messed up many retail strips.
  Even wandering around Oakridge Mall, the only City mall outside of downtown Vancouver is showing some gaps, (but all malls are like that these days as national chains go bankrupt or reassess their locations. See Richmond Centre with your list of Jacob, Bombay, and other soon-to-close chains, or visit Brentwood or Coquitlam Centre.)

  And it’s all Vision Vancouver’s fault! ( 😉 )

  The encouragement of male-predominant (game developers, Hootsuite, etc.) industry with City policies do warp the street life of parts of Vancouver.
  Housing prices, and rents, are forcing those who form families out of Vancouver.
  And because they make no complaint or noise when they move out of the City of Vancouver, nor does the invalid National Household Survey that was formerly the Long Form Census record them accurately over the 5 year period, we don’t hear or see the changes.

  Vision has left the facade, but behind the Potemkin Village propped up, it is a hollow City.

  Maybe we should look at the full policies of the other parties and see public, measured criticism of the proposals would be more useful.

  Four more years?

• 25 Bill Lee // Sep 14, 2014 at 10:42 pm

  More on twitter followers, 1300 words,

  http://justinmcelroy.com/2014/09/14/the-13000-new-followers-of-vision-vancouver/

  September 14, 2014 by Justin McElroy
  The 13,000 new followers of Vision Vancouver

  There’s something about having untold “fake” followers on Twitter that bugs me. More than most things bug me.

  Part of it is the blatant dishonesty. The new followers aren’t, in any common usage of the word, real people. Or even a real (shudder) brand. They’re plants. Phonies. Deliberately added to create a false impression.

  The second irksome thing is that deliberately gaining fake Twitter followers is a sign of vanity and status-pushing. The only reason to add fake followers is so people think you have more real ones. So they will hold you in greater esteem.

  Which is fine, in the sense that most people are needy. But most don’t take such big shortcuts on social media to achieve it. Which goes back to the dishonesty.

  But the final strike is that it’s hard to directly and specifically call people out this practice. We inherently know it’s ethically dubious. Yet we often discuss inflated follower counts with whispers and gossip.

  There are plenty ways of determining the veracity of followers, but most are fairly broad and don’t bore into the absurd details of ghost accounts. This is mostly because most people have better things to do with their lives.

  Well, I don’t have better things to do with my life. And after Chris Parry said that Vision Vancouver had increased their Twitter account by about 11,000 followers in one day, I decided to do some snooping. The nice thing about Twitter is that it lists followers in reverse chronological order, so all you have to do is press the spacebar many times.

  [MORE]
  [ and he does, many times ]

  Bob Mackin reminds us of the twitter for the Asian accounts, relinking to the January story.
  vancourier.com/news/mayor-s-zombie-fans-on-chinese-twitter-troubled-staff-1.808220

• 26 Raymond Tomlin // Sep 16, 2014 at 3:31 pm

  As of today (Tuesday, Sept. 16), employing Twitter Audit, on my own Twitter account (@raytomlin), I have a 95% Twitter audit score (boo hoo, 33 fake followers).

  Vision Vancouver: 59 Real, 19,547 Fake (0% audit score), a dreadful audit score, which would have to be concerning to them. Vancouver Non Partisan Association (NPA): 1,709 Real, 153 Fake (92% score) – not bad. Green Party of Vancouver: 553 Real followers, 22 Fake (96% audit score!).

  Can’t check the rest for 4 days, cuz without a Pro account I am limited in the number of times I can access Twitter Audit.

  How ya doin’ with the Twitter Audit score on your Twitter account, Frances? Betcha pretty good!