Neither my last MP Vince Cable, or now (since I’ve moved to Kingston) Ed Davey seem to do the online thing, with not much response to email and no tweets since May 2010.

In fairness, both seem to blog quite a bit and I haven’t yet tested their response rate to a dead-tree format letter.

But this got me thinking – is twitter and social media truly a way for MPs to reach out and engage with their electorate? or is it just a handy tool for some publicity every 4 years when they want our votes.

It would be a shame if the latter were true, since it’s a relatively easy way to publish information, particularly to a younger audience.

So I’ve compiled a list of MPs who haven’t tweeted in the last 6 months (most haven’t since the last election), along with a count of their followers:

With over 22 thousand followers Vince Cable is missing a trick. Perhaps he’s lost the password?

As always corrections and feedback most welcome.

Update – @leighMP is now @andyburnhammp which is regularly updated – thanks to @CollectorManiac for pointing that one out.

It seemed to make sense at the time. Thanks to @firebox for the feature. Here’s hoping for some freebies.

All change here

The new layout features a 50/50 split between the twitter stream and trending, lists and suggestion columns – which should suit the more popular widescreen monitor formats. Search is more prominently sitting at the top of the page, and lists and searches are included in dropdown menus. Clicking on a tweet operates a slide out page with more information on that tweet or user.

The new layout seems to have messed up a lot of custom backgrounds although these are a bit of an ugly hack which attempt to shoehorn more contact information onto a twitter page.

In terms of new features – twitter have now launched shortcuts to a lot of the common twitter functions:

Just like a twitter client

Hitting a key brings up a lightbox style popup window with the appropriate function.

Favourite tweets also have a bit more prominence as well, which is a feature I’ve hardly bothered with.

The overall feel is that twitter.com includes more of the features of the many twitter clients that are available – which in itself is perhaps a reaction to the laissez-faire attitude twitter has to it’s service: build too good an API and no-one will visit your website anymore.

There are functions that turn @usernames into links automatically, but interestingly it’s also possible to edit the ‘sent via’ bit of text that appears next to your tweet.

For example the shamelessly self publicising:

I stuck with a boring name for this one

The via Kimondo (Pete Taylor) bit links to whatever site you set up when you register your app, which makes for some handy self publicity. I’m fairly sure that setting the app name to ‘buy some teeth whitening stuff here’ would infringe on Twitter’s terms of service, but I’m surprised no-ones tried it yet.

There’s a handy step by step guide on how to create your own @anywhere box here and you can see my attempt here. You can already get wordpress plugins that dovetail the functionality into your site.

You can follow me @kimondo to see the tweet.

Killer KitKats

This week saw two interesting social media ‘fails’. First we had Nestlé’s reaction to a greenpeace video about their use of palm oil in KitKat.  The increasing use of Palm oil has resulted in devastating destruction of rainforests and peatlands to create vast monoculture plantations. It’s a classic ecowarriors versus evil-corporation style campaign which is gaining a lot of support. Greenpeace’s opening shot is here:

I must admit, it’s a quite horrible shock advert in the usual Greenpeace style – Nestlé’s response was to get the video taken down from YouTube citing infringement of their trademarked logo.  Almost since the beginning of YouTube what usually happens when a video is taken offline,  a copy will be almost immediately uploaded again;  and Greenpeace of course used this response to generate support for their campaign, and even made the original available for supporters to upload using their own accounts.

The effect was immediate with tweets and facebook updates being bound around mentioning Nestlé’s censorship tactics – a suitably rebellious message which is popular for users of social media to repeat and pass on.

This is a classic example of the ‘Streisand effect ‘ in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information from the public domain has the unintended consequence of generating more publicity than if it had just been left online.

Nestlé didn’t stop there however: inevitably as their Facebook page became the source of comments and questions about their use of Palm oil, Nestlé instead responded angrily to the use of their logo as an avatar image, again resulting in yet another deluge of tweets and status updates.

The end result was Greenpeace claiming the upper hand, and Nestlé looking out of step with the campaigners and their customers.

#CashGordon – whose fail?

The other social media ‘fail’ of the past week has been the Conservative website launched to promote the message that Gordon Brown is supported by money for the Unite Union – currently supporting a strike by British Airways workers that has divided opinion. Interestingly the CashGordon  site features an unmoderated twitter stream repeating every tweet with the #cashgordon hashtag. It’s a particularly old school concept which dates from when twitter was a relatively new phenomenon, and having anyone tweet about your site was quite exciting.

The more left wing tweeters have jumped on this hashtag with a stream of abuse – many of which are too rude to put here, but which include things like:

@fusi_loving the EPIC FAIL that is #cashgordon – they cant even get a twitter feed right, what are they gonna do with the economy? lol. #toryfail

and

@lordbonkers Write something rude about the Tories, mark it#cashgordon and they post it on their own campaign site for youhttp://cash-gordon.com/

and the rather damming:

@psbook New post –> Tory ‘Cash Gordon’ campaign designed by US anti-healthcare lobbyist http://is.gd/aSFIF #cashgordon

Interestingly however the very presence of the website, and the numerous comments on the #cashgordon hashtag has had the unintended consequence of bringing the whole campaign to the attention of a much wider audience (at time of writing #cashgordon is trending in the top ten of the UK) which itself is being claimed as a success.

Update: I’ll see if I can tally up the tweets to see who can claim victory on this one

Another Update: nope, quite clear epic fail

Epic fail

Bzzzzz

So everyone’s buzzing (sometimes quite angrily) about google’s new attempt to make gmail a bit more social. I noticed that in the list of sites I could connect kimondo.co.uk didn’t appear, yet a few older websites I worked on did show up in the list.

A quick google later and I found this workaround based on editing the page headers:

You can manually associate your site with your account by adding this piece of code to your html code’s header part. Just replace profilename with your Google profile name. Usually takes a few days for Google to pick-up the information.

<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/profilename”/>

However there’s an even quicker way which works almost instantly – just go to the superbly retro-titled google’s webmaster tools and add your site or blog to the list. You can do this with a html file upload or by adding a meta tag to the top of the page to verify the site. Once verified it appears on the list of sites you can add in to buzz.

Not sure if it’s working out cities using IP addresses, geotagging or the user’s self declared location (in which instance we’d all be tweeting from Tehran).

Now including Brixton

http://charity.further.co.uk/

By tweeting:

Tweeting this message gets 10p donated to The Children’s Society charity http://bit.ly/4PcaKP #furthercharity

your profile picture then appears on the page and the Christmas tree totalizer counts up the donations. There’s the option to top up your donation as well – although I’d be interested to find out how many tweeps actually do this. It’s always good to see twitter being used for things other than talking about Tiger Woods.

Give a tweet this Christmas

Stephen Fry was there in a warm-up capacity presumably because of his oft-voiced love of the iPhone which he uses to disseminate musings that range from being trapped in lifts, to jogging in New York. However, perhaps rather embarrasingly for Apple, Mr Fry decided to use his spot at the iTunes festival to have a go at the practices of the big music companies in aggressively pursuing illegal downloaders and filesharers.

my business – the film business, the television business, the music business – is doing the wrong thing

He spoke out against the ludicrous advert that compares downloading to pinching a handbag or stealing a car. He even fessed up to having bit-torrented a TV show – although covered himself by stating that he had already bought it on iTunes, and for some slightly unusual bandwidth reasons was unable to download it in the normal way.

Now this was all very interesting – and wildly popular with the crowd, however it seemed a little at odds to me. At the bottom of the pdf ticket I’d printed off to turn up at the gig was stated:

*You are not permitted to make audio or audiovisual recordings of the event

So when asked for a bit of feedback I tweeted the following:

listening to @stephenfry slagging off drm at itunes – where i’d get thrown out if caught filming him !

Which got slightly paraphrased when he read it on stage. Stephen Fry’s response was that everyone there was filming and photographing and tweeting – and that his speech would probably turn up on YouTube before the evening was out.

Sadly my fifteen minutes of twitter fame (quoted by the great Mr Fry – crikey!) went unnoticed to everyone but me. It even managed to get a blog on the bbc.

Maybe one day my shameless-self-publicity engine won’t let me down!

For more twitter excitement you can follow me at @kimondo

And yes, Stephen Fry did turn up on YouTube:

Stephen Fry talking at iTunes Live