AJC: Atlanta’s mayoral candidates are Twits
May 18, 2009 at 4:56 pm by Asher Smith in News
Mayoral front-runners: Borders (left), Norwood (middle) and Reed (right)
As reported by the AJC, Atlanta’s mayoral candidates have taken to social networking sites such as Twitter, utilizing the art of mass-updating to keep in constant touch with supporters and potential voters. And where there’s a seemingly innovative new political outreach tool, there’s almost always a predictable new catchphrase for it:
“This will be the Facebook election,” said Emory University associate professor Michael Leo Owens.
Four candidates — [Council President Lisa] Borders, Councilwoman Mary Norwood, state Sen. Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta) and [Glenn] Thomas, a former city employee — each have pages and videos on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Candidate Rod Mack, who works in logistics, has a MySpace page that plays the Sam Cooke classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
The campaigns do concede that, most often, it’s their staffs who are updating these accounts for them. Borders, for example, has three individuals from the firm Relate Media Group on staff to manage her social networking accounts.
Like everything else in politics, this is a competition — one that Reed and Borders would seem to have a head start on. Reed boasts more than 4,000 Facebook friends, while Borders has approximately 1,700. Each have more than 1,100 official supporters listed on their Facebook pages. On Twitter, Borders has more followers than any candidate: 749 as of last Sunday.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Can someone donate Lisa a bottle of Rogain