Oak Ridges-Markham Candidate Mid-Term Twitter Progress Report Card.

BY Brian Weller | BLOGGER

Oak Ridges-Markham

I wanted to review the Twitter accounts of each candidate and below is what I see:

Grade: A - Green - Trifon Haitas, great balance of information, personality and conversation with digital natives. knows the twitter culture
Grade: B - Liberal -Helena Jaczek, mostly sharing, some engagement. very personable tone. understands digital culture. decent engagement and personality. mostly broadcasting campaign messages. focused on mainstream news. a little more engagement and she is an A.
Grade : B - Conservative - Farid Wassef, injects personality into announcements. he is engaging with the public. he is all over twitter though likely has a lot of help. has potential
Grade: C - NDP - Joe Whitfeld, understands digital conversation. responding to and engaging with people. I would like to see more political insight to balance the personality
Grade: F - Family Coalition - Patrick Redmond, no twitter presence listed or not easily found
Grade: F - Libertarian - Karl Boelling, no twitter presence listed or not easily found

For those who use Twitter as a communication tool, I intend to put a simple question to them: what does social media mean to YOU? I will do that partly as a test to see who is monitoring the online conversation, and partly to see what social media really means to the candidates. Of the 6 Oak Ridges-Markham candidates I will attempt to reach out to, I will be curious to see how many insightful responses I will receive but whatever, I will incorporate them into additional posts on my blog.

Before October 6th, I will also proudly declare which candidates has won the title of Most Engaged Candidate. Besides being A tweeters, they are tweeting each other with sign down announcements when they spot defaced or downed campaign signs. Competitive and supportive.

In the course of my local election research as your community correspondent on the Speak Your Mind election team (you may even see the odd hashtag in some of my tweets), I will be watching and tweeting our candidates during the campaign, especially during debate panels and on election night with your questions so keep them coming...they have been insightful!