Tweet, tweet irony in Vancouver’s mayoral race

Fresh on the heels of what could be argued as the first President that social media elected came a social media gaff in Vancouver’s mayoral race.

The story broke in the Vancouver Sun and was tweeted and blogged by many local digerati including Colleen of BuzzNetworker:

The lessons to take out of this? Register your name and your company name in all of the social marketing sites right away. Not owning your own name could come with serious consequences. And, if you’re trying to get people to choose you over another option, don’t try to win that vote by point out what the other guy is doing wrong. In this age of transparency and honesty, you just look petty and childish. Source: Local Politics use Twitter Poorly

And Michael Tippett of NowPublic who also commented on the fact that while we were arguing over a social media gaff, the current city council put us all on the hook for $100 million to guarantee that the Olympic Village will be finished on time (no mention of whether the social housing will actually make it).

Now you want the truly ironic part? The last mayoral debate before the election on this Wednesday which is hosted by the CBC will take questions from Twitter and be live-tweeting the event!

I’ve had a long while to think about this whole Twitter-jacking business. In the great scheme of things, it was a pretty stupid thing to actually use the Twitter account. Yes, “fakePeterLadner” would have been much better from the get go. I think the Vision Vancouver team has taken some well-deserved lumps from the social media community on this issue. There are any number of us who are Vision supporters, including myself, who they could have bounced the idea off of and all of us (I hope) would have told them not to do it, just sit on the name.

The greater point is that, like we heard at the Vancouver Board of Trade panel recently, you can’t just sit back and ignore social media. Fine, don’t participate, but at least stake your claim. Buy domains, reserve names on Twitter, etc. if nothing else so they can’t be used against you.

Remember when the web was young and the idea of a candidate or party website was alien to most politicians? Remember how many got burned when domains were bought out from under them?

Social media is just the same, so get with the program people. Good grief the Ladner and NPA campaign could have used “Twittergate” to distract us from the greater issue of the $100 million dollars voted on in secret and seal as in camera. Alas they didn’t.

I guess the only thing left to do is to listen to the debate on Wednesday and vote two days later.

Tagged as: gregor robertson, npa, peter ladner, politics, Social Media, twitter, Vancouver, Vision Vancouver

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1 Raul November 11, 2008 at 3:16 pm: I am disappointed in the way Vision Vancouver (well, one of their staff members, arguably) took over the Peter Ladner Twitter account. But as you said, even if people don’t use it, they at least should be sitting on all their Web 2.0 domains/names/accounts. Great post Tris.

Raul´s last blog post..Greening fashion in the Vancouver Fashion Week

2 Tris Hussey November 11, 2008 at 4:50 pm: Thanks Raul. Just like any new medium political parties, companies, etc (even ones we like and support) are going to blow it. I think our job is to tell them and teach.