The Liberal Democrat’s leader has just given a very good, well received speech at their annual conference. Nothing odd there - it’s conference season after all.
But what is odd, is this. I mentioned in this post that tools are all well and good unless you hide behind them or forget about them.
Well I’m afraid the Lib Dems are guilty of that. One of their MP’s was on BBC Radio 5Live immediately after Nick Clegg’s speech talking about how their party was using ‘all social media to connect with, and get their message across to, the public’. So, I checked out their Twitter feed to get some inside updates and guess what? They were still trailing a speech due to happen two days ago : “Watch Jenny Willott’s 1st conference speech as our Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary”
I feel for them. It’s a great idea to use Twitter and Channel 4 News do it brilliantly - but the Lib Dems have simply failed. Someone in their office has said, “let’s use Twitter” and then forgotten about it or so it appears.
![](http://twitter.com/home?status=rt:+@<link type="image/png" rel="image" href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/325065194/keteki-avatar_normal.jpg"/>+http%3A%2F%2FKeteki.com)
Well hello again!
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on Sep 17th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
The party’s official Twitter channel is only one (relatively small) part of our overall use of Twitter as a party. In particular - as rather fits the Web 2.0 world - we encourage and help individual party members to use Twitter to provide their own ongoing coverage of events, and for the first time at this conference we got people using a common hash tag (#LibDem08) so that people could find and track all the different conference related comments people were making. There have also been a series of blog posts on http://www.libdemvoice.org to help spread the word about Twitter and its possibilities to a wider audience of members and supporters.
I think Twitter added a useful new angle to the coverage as it’s almost like having a real time commentary from the audience, plus it also means far more of the unofficial side of conference is shared and discussed. It’s a fair point that our official channel could (should) have had a few more tweets between Monday morning and this afternoon - will try harder next time!
Amongst our other Twitter work, we’ve also recently started adding an easy ‘post to Twitter’ link to the newsfeeds from the party’s various main national websites, and it will be interesting to see how those work.