10 Things Nan Rich Needs To Do On Social Media

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nanNan Rich is the only declared democratic candidate for Florida’s governor race in 2014.  She’s already picked up significant endorsements.  And, yet, she’s in danger of becoming the sunshine state’s Rodney Dangerfield: she don’t get no respect.  (Except by Republicans.)

It’s clear that she’s going to have to fight an insurgent’s battle for the office, and that means harnessing social media.  Unfortunately, she’s only lightly used social media so far, and that light use isn’t giving her the boost she needs to capture Tallahassee.  I’ve posted other articles comparing the results she gets on Twitter to other potential candidates, and it’s obvious that she is way behind.

But that can change. Senator Rich can quickly improve her use of social media and end up dominating the conversation in the race.  To achieve that improvement there are 10 simple things Rich needs to do:

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The Anti-Social Behavior of Social Commerce

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Imagine if you walked into a Nordstrom department store in a mall and immediately were confronted by a lawyer who shoved a contract into your hands and demanded you sign it before going any further into the store. You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or scream, but you would undoubtedly throw the contract back into the lawyer’s face and storm out of the store.  Nordstrom would have lost a customer for life.

No department store, Nordstrom or others, would ever attempt to do such a thing, of course, because of the ill-will it would generate.  Or would they?

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Florida’s 2014 Governor Race on Twitter, April & May 2013

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The range of possible candidates for Florida’s 2014 gubernatorial race continues to grow even as many of the potential candidates remain coy about their intentions.  But most are not just playing coy, they’re playing dead on Twitter, judging by activity over the past two months:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Only current governor Rick Scott has an ongoing, regular pulse on Twitter; the rest have a brief moment of activity and settle back down into quiet.

Other than the first wave of speculation about Bill Nelson’s candidacy it’s been fairly quiet for him.  I will  add Pam Iorio this month and will have her data starting with the June charts.  So far, though, she’s not creating a big impact on Twitter.

As you can see from the charts, only Will Weatherford and Charlie Crist have an ongoing ability to generate talk on a level similar to Rick Scott.  With the state’s legislative season coming to an end, it will be interesting to see if Weatherford continues to generate conversation or disappears back into the noise.

And poor Nan Rich — even though she is more or less the only declared democratic candidate she can’t get a break from the party or from Twitter.  I’ll look at her candidacy on Twitter in more detail later on this month.

Introducing HootSchedule — A Utility for Creating HootSuite Batch Files

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I use HootSuite to manage my various social media accounts, and one of the killer features it offers is the ability to schedule batch updates.  But it’s not so easy to generate the CSV file necessary and, if you have a set of messages you want to repeat, you have to do a lot of work to create unique versions of each one so you don’t end up with your batch rejected for duplicate messages.

I wrote a simple utility to help create and manage the generation of HootSuite batch files, including introducing random permutations into each message so you can repeat your points without repeating your text.

You can find out more information on the HootSchedule page of this website!

Ed Schultz settles in nicely on MSNBC weekends

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Back in March it was announced that Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show would move to the weekends, and almost immediately he was disappeared1 from the airwaves to be replaced by Chris Hayes’s All In show.  But something odd happened — his weekend reboot didn’t happen, and the timing of it became murkier and murkier.  Many of us wondered if there was going to be a re-launch at all.  But May 11th saw his return to TV at the 5pm weekend time slot.

The long absence led a lot of us to wonder: Would Ed’s audience return to him now? How would that time slot work? 

Good news: it looks like Ed is back in his groove and, judging by his Twitter engagement, he’s audience is with him.

A year of @EdShow

A year of @EdShow

The chart shows discussion of The Ed Show on Twitter over the past year, and you can see that the past two weekends have hit levels on a par with Ed’s engagement during the  span of his daily weekday show.

Even more interesting, if you compare Ed to the two other weekend “point of view”shows (MHP Show and Up with Steve Kornacki), you can see that he’s getting the roughly same engagement out of a one hour show that they are each getting out of two hour shows:

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Glad to see Ed’s gotten back to work!

1: Strange gramatical form to imply the work of an unknown force…