Social Media & the 2010 Mayoral Campaign: CalgaryPuck as a campaign strategy.

[c.t.ner]

Last Monday a local tech/social media meet-up group called Third Tuesdays, held a pretty interesting roundtable discussion on "Election Dissection: The Role of Social Media in the 2010 campaign". It was a really good discussion (from what I saw online) and it had some key players throughout the campaign talking.

Including:

• DJ Kelly (Moderator for all 14 civic camp forums)
• Stephen Carter (PR for the Nenshi Campaign)
• Alex Zagoumenov (Social Media coordinator for Barb's campaign)

Anyways, Alex Zagoumenov has written a great post about the talk and some of the learning points that came up during the conversation. Interesting enough this was of note:

Know your audience. Speak their language. Be where they are. According to Stephen Carter, Twitter was not the primary choice to start the campaign. Instead they started with CalgaryPuck and Beyond forums where Calgarians with strong opinions live.

Thought some of you civic election junkies might be interested in that little tidbit.

[Bigtime]

I remember seeing Alex Zagoumenov's tweets, he had no clue how to utilize twitter to help Barb's cause.

Edit: And he still thinks Barb could have had a shot at the big chair if they had started earlier. The laughs keep on coming!

I think Stephen Carter should also not discount the help from us "latte-sipping urbanists" from SSP. Quite a few of us are members here and over at Beyond, so I think that helped in spreading the word of Nenshi.

[Phanuthier]

I actually heard about this on NPR radio in the USA. I didn't really follow the mayoral race, but from an outsider POV it was interesting to see the "fad" Nenshi became on CP and FB. Not saying Nenshi wasn't a qualified candidate, but it really seemed like this mayoral race really broke from conventional election campaigning where typical "fad" votes have been something other than social networking driven. Which begs the question, how big of a role will social media play in federal elections, presidential elections, etc. And is it for better or for worse.