Just Watch Me: Substantive Debate on Twitter

Let’s go back a ways. You may remember a time when politicians made themselves available to speak with the media in, gasp, unstructured ways. I wasn’t born yet, and can’t speak from experience, but I’ve heard that Pierre Trudeau once engaged in a wide-ranging and impromptu debate with a CBC reporter about that PM’s response to the FLQ crisis, while on tape. By today’s standards, the clip on Youtube is almost agonizingly long (6 minutes).

Sadly, the trend over the last couple of decades has been for politicians (and businesses as well) to make use of more and more carefully-staged theatre. But sometimes a politician with chutzpah or a member of our intrepid media throws out all the rules. Through Twitter. Last night.

Video content courtesy of the CBC and ColonelDan.

Sometimes the parties involved are Andrew Coyne and Tony Clement, debating the merits of the government overturning a recent CRTC ruling on Internet billing that I won’t get in to. As FP’s Ottawa Correspondent pointed out, Tony Clement made what is possibly the first ever policy decree over social media.* Though anonymous sources had suggested the government would overturn the CRTC’s decision, the minister chose to confirm that rumour over Twitter before going to traditional media.

You can view the entire spat using a handy tool: Bettween.

I think this is really important, and I think it’s really important for six reasons:

1. Twitter is on its way to becoming an official channel for communication, and for some (including Edelman clients) the media does not necessarily deserve a right of first refusal. For many more this demonstrates that not having Twitter is becoming less and less of an option.
2. The influencer to influencer relationship (top top) is just as important as the influencer to influencee (top down) relationship – or more important than. When building programs, you can use tools like TweetLevel to identify who influences the influencers.
3. Influencer to influencer interaction reaches the audiences of both. This is a bit of an obvious point, but worth repeating. Of course, influencers sharing a field of expertise will share more followers as well. You can evaluate the shared audience of two users with tools like TweepDiff. Note that Twitter filters out of your tweetstream @replies from someone you follow that are directed to someone you don’t follow.
4. Brief and coherent will be expected, even with complex issues. We are entering a period where 140 characters is considered enough to say anything. Get better at tweeting hard tweets. Link less.
5. We need to re-think the value of private communication (e.g. pitch emails). Firms and people with a social media presence can extract added value from the social graph by publicly engaging the influencers in their network. In some cases this value may overshadow the cost-benefit of the behind-the-scenes activities we in PR specialize in.
6. Not all influencer to influencer interactions will be combative. Nonetheless, we must be mindful of the risks.

The interesting question is to ask how far Tony Clement (and other Twitter outliers such as the former Mayor Miller) will go in creating an environment for unscheduled debate of substantive issues. His answer may be something like: just watch me.