McCain's Tweets

Maureen Dowd's Stage of Fools piece in the NYT discusses the content of Senator John McCain's efforts on Twitter, focusing on his top ten lists of stimulus pork. As that ground has been plowed, I will confine my remarks to his tweet style.

First of all, I believe that Senator McCain is posting his own tweets because they don't appear everyday. If this task had been assigned to a staffer, I would expect to see more regular output. For example, he does not tweet on most weekends and he skips some weekdays, such as February 9. Also, when not pork listing, he maxes out at 3 or 4 tweets.

McCain uses tweets primarily for three things: a public day timer (e.g. "I am working in my office on Capitol Hill today."), a promo (e.g. "Watch my interview with Fox & Friends LIVE @ 8:15 am"), and to garner media attention by listing pork (e.g. "$95,000 for Hawaii Public Radio"). This last use subverts the whole concept of Twitter, which is micro blogging or the publishing of a tweet, a self-contained 140 character message (or less). By assembling a lengthy communication into successive tweets, he is exploiting Twitter's ability to stream messages into mobile devices in real time, but making the recipients read the message in a start/stop fashion. For example, on March 5, he started his list at 6:41am and ended it at 1:35pm. A list is more easily read from the archive once it is posted in entirety, which means that Senator McCain should be blogging, not Twittering.

Another style issue is prefacing, or sending a tweet to say you are about to send a tweet (e.g. "and the #1 project is..." ). To me, it's just getting around the 140 character limit.

The Twitter homepage states that a tweet is an answer to the question "What are you doing?", however, my experience with the Facebook status feature suggests that micro blogs are just as concerned with what people are thinking or feeling. We rarely get that from Senator McCain. On occasion, he might twitter something like "I appreciate Senator Byrd speaking in favor of my Constitutional point of order", but not very often.

Tweets (as I experience in Facebook) can also be funny. I am seeing no humor in Senator McCain's thumb jockeying. OK, Congress is serious business but he is using something called "Twitter." Throw us a bone every once in a while. Actually, the "Happy Birthday Joe Lieberman!!" tweet on Feb 24 was a little bit funny.

One cute thing McCain does is to start some tweets with ICYMI, which I have never seen before but assume means "in case you missed it". I find it cute because it's almost always unnecessary. In 159 updates, he has yet to utter a single LOL, ROFL, or WTF, which one might expect given his history of salty language.

In the final analysis, there is nothing really wrong with McCain's tweets. Hey, it's a free country. He is simply using a new technology, getting some media attention because of it, and possibly shedding a bit of his internet-illiterate image. But he has not embraced the spirit of micro blogging, which is more related to social interaction than public relations, at least this week.