Publications
Partners
Newly elected DA leader Mmusi Maimane hosted a Twitter town hall this week, which trended worldwide, with some 165 000 tweets at last count.
The DA quickly claimed it as a victory for its new leader, with one tweet reading that Maimane had engaged more “ordinary South Africans” than the @Presidency account had done in two years. “Maimane storms Twitter” read one daily front page. But remember, the demographic of Twitter is hardly “ordinary” and continues to represent the voices that are already heard in print and broadcast media.
In 2015, any (honest) communications person worth his or her high salary will tell you that analytics is not irrefutable, but also does not necessarily translate to anything tangible in the real world.
You can have the greatest reach in the world and it can all be trash – ask the nice people who started #myNYPD or #AskRKelly. (#MyNYPD was started by the New York Police Department, and was intended to show support for them. Instead, it was used to highlight their record of violence against unarmed black people. #AskRKelly was intended to get fans to interact with R Kelly following the release of his album, but was flooded with questions about his controversial sexual behaviour.)
Analytics requires interpretation for it to be meaningful information, and thus one can also make social-media analytics pretty much sing whatever song you want – that’s also why it’s so important.
The truth is #AskMmusi, like the #AskRKelly and #AskRobinThicke Qandamp;As, wasn’t directed by the person whose name it carried. That’s how tweets asking the new party leader whether he had a Smart Shopper card and another which read, “My name is Tshepo, I’m tired of white people calling me Chepu, can you draft a policy against this?” were among the most retweeted using the hashtag.
Rather than admit Maimane played by Twitter’s rules and that the stunt was used for the sake of entertainment, the DA quickly ran with the analytics from the engagement – as though Twitter users don’t understand how analytics works.
The town hall invited the user to “get to know more about the new DA leader Mmusi Maimane, and his vision for South Africa”. Maimane tweeting the lyrics to Mdu Masilela’s Mazola doesn’t seem like a vision for South Africa, but a quick adaptation to a topic that quickly went in an unexpected direction. Please tell us again how it trended worldwide.
And it’s not personal. Twitter Qandamp;As are never going to go the way you want. And that has nothing to do with Twitter not caring about “serious issues” – not when you are speaking to one of the most well-read, active and politicised social-media users in the world. But also, to be frank, Maimane’s prepared answers were not a “serious issue”, so the “black Twitter isn’t serious” notion is bull. Black Twitter is always serious, not just when Maimane decides it should be.
Last year, following the disasters of #AskRKelly, #myNYPD and others, Radio.com wrote: “The idea that you can corral the internet into a respectable town hall meeting ... is, to put it in no uncertain terms, impossible.”
New-media guru BL Ochman said “brands encouraging consumers to engage in Qandamp;As with them have been experiencing entirely predictable wrath – begging the question: What did they expect?”
The DA must have not read any of the endless writing on the failure of Twitter Qandamp;As, or they read it and thought they would be special, like every other subverted hashtag. Fact is, you will lose. And that’s because Twitter, as one ANC Youth League president once said, “is a revolutionary house”.
Follow me on Twitter @GugsM
