David Cameron is on Twitter. It's about time. Frankly he should have made the jump a long time ago and, if he had, he wouldn't have received the reaction to his account that he has experienced.
His first meaningful tweet was about the NHS.
The problem with tweeting about this is that hospital wards are closing and staff are losing their jobs because of insufficient funding. Additionally, the funding to which he referred was in the form of loans and not additional cash. To quote Sky News:
"The money will initially be made available to hospitals in the form of loans, although they will only have to pay back a proportion of it, depending how well they perform according to feedback from the public."
Cameron received a torrent of abuse in his twitter stream which he must have expected. I'm sure that there's never been a Prime Minister who has ever had 100% approval ratings and Twitter is well-known as a platform where people can vent their views and opinions without a thought to the hurt it can cause.
There are many celebrities who have found it difficult to cope with event the smallest criticism aimed at, or about them on Twitter.
David Cameron must, therefore, have a strong constitution, because only Mark Bridger (the man charged with the murder of April Jones) would be likely to see stronger, more vitriolic abuse on the micro-blogging platform.
One of my favourite intelligent responses was this:
And the link to the blog in the tweet is here. Dr Clarke seems to have a great handle on exactly how the Conservatives are privatising our Health Service and benefitting financially in the process.
One of the better parody responses is here:
And then there were the thousands of abusive tweets and comical putdowns. You can find them all here. You may need to scroll a bit for some of the best ones.
I think the abusive tweets could serve Cameron well though and if I were on his PR/Soc Med team I would be advising a new type of analytics. Daily there could be a count of the ratio in @ mentions of the words c*** and w***er to followers. So if there were 50,000 mentions of the word c*** in @ replies to a total number of followers of 100,000 then you'd have a C Score for the day of 50%. Similarly if there were 25,000 mentions of the word w***er in replies to @david_cameron you'd have a W Score of 25%.
A successful day, in the eyes of the Tory PR team, could be one in which the C and W scores are both below 25%. For accurate measurement one would need to include those who use asterisks to avoid offence but this is all possible using a number of Twitter tools. Once the C and W scores are being used one could extend the report to include the B score, the T score and the P score.
So @david_cameron - if you need a hand with your Social Media analytics then give me a call. My services are expensive, but worth it, and, for a man of your means, I'm sure cost isn't even a consideration. I won't be donating to your party though. I am happy to tell you exactly what the country thinks of you, wrapped up in a nice little Social Media report, but wouldn't want to get my hands dirty by supporting your career financially.
