After our series of articles looking at whether candidates locally are using social media to help promote their campaigns we can now show an example of how not to use it.

George Hollingbery the Conservative Candidate for the Meon Valley Constituency decided to use humour and irony on twitter. Now there is nothing wrong with that in principle, the British people are generally welcoming of a good ironic comment when delivered with that distinctive tone of voice and a wink. Twitter however strips that from communication so what we were left with was:

It was a badly thought out comment that should not have been made and was quickly deleted.

I fully support the use of this medium in the General Election but only when done well.  So far I have seen few examples of well thought out and well executed online campaigns using any version of social media or blogging.

Related posts:

1. Use Tweetdeck and make your comments appropriate
2. General Election and Social Media – Part 2
3. General Election and Social Media
4. Twitter – The post every website should have
5. Do you have a Gravatar