Eloquent Defense Saves Parliamentary Tweets
(SIPA’s Twitter Chat set for tomorrow! See instructions below.)
Wow, Twitter certainly reaches wide and far. Silicon.com reported yesterday that MPs (Members of Parliament) voted against a motion that would have banned tweeting inside the House of Commons. I must give kudos to writer Nick Heath’s lead: “To tweet or not to tweet? That was the question on the minds of Westminster’s political elite last week.”
A spirited defense by MP Kevin Brennan from Cardiff West apparently saved the 140-character day. Brennan invoked none other than Sir Winston Churchill when he first defended Twitter in an article in a British magazine. Then, in the House of Commons, he responded to criticisms of MPs who tweet by saying that “such technology” should be embraced for its enlivening of debates and the outside information it brings in.
“If Ministers can get in-flight refuelling from the officials’ box, why cannot Back Benchers get in-flight refuelling electronically during their speeches if a useful fact can be drawn from outside?” Brennan asked in prose that you might be hard-pressed to hear in our Congress.
He then brought up Churchill again. “I will end by simply saying that there is nothing new in political communication in trying to get a message across in a pithy, memorable way, as Twitter enables us to do. In fact, I think that it was a certain Winston Churchill who said: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’—[Official Report, 20 August 1940; Vol. 364, c. 1167.] If that statement was issued as a tweet, it would leave 66 of the 140 characters available on Twitter still to play with. That goes to show that those who want to fight the onslaught of technology on the beaches will find that the tide is turning against them.”
I hate to use “Wow” twice in one article, but wow. That is incredibly well put. One can only hope that tomorrow’s first-ever SIPA Twitter Chat will yield some equally effective bon mots. The Chat takes place from noon to 1 p.m. Eastern time. Here are the instructions for taking part:
Log onto your preferred Twitter client and search for the hashtag #NicheInfo. You then can join the conversation from there – just make sure you include the hashtag in your tweets as well so others can see their conversation! (If you would like a suggestion on a preferred Twitter chat client, one choice we recommend is TweetChat.com. You log in through your Twitter account, type in the hashtag, and then all the tweets will appear below the search box. Better yet, every tweet you type will automatically include the hashtag in your tweets so you don’t have to manually type it in each tweet.)
In defense of tweeting, Silicon.com quotes prominent MP Chris Bryant: “The world has changed. When I was first elected in 2001, the vast majority of my constituents got in touch with me by coming to a constituency surgery. Now the vast majority get in touch by Facebook, Twitter, email and, sometimes, text messages. We should make that more possible for our constituents, not more difficult.”
They also report that “of the 650 MPs in the UK, some 300 have signed up for a Twitter account—with 100 joining the social network in the last six months.” Interestingly enough, Melissa Bell, who blogs about social media for The Washington Post, wrote that Churchill’s estate started a Twitter account in 2010 “to tweet out the ‘official wit and wisdom’ of Churchill. It has since gone silent.” She got that from an article in The Telegraph from last year with the headline, “Winston Churchill joins Twitter, Facebook and builds an iPhone app.”
I’m surprised that didn’t start a trend (as far as I know). It seems like there were many more “tweetable” sayings back in the day—Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”; Hoover’s “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”; FDR’s “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future”; and even John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight.”
Nothing of those historic proportions will most likely come out of tomorrow’s SIPA Twitter Chat, but we can promise a spirited, informative, insightful, perhaps even incite-full, dialogue between publishers and marketers alike. Please join us.
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SIPA Twitter Chat
Wednesday, Oct. 19, 12–1 p.m. Eastern time
Log onto your preferred Twitter client and search for
the hashtag #NicheInfo. You then can join the conversation
from there (just make sure you include the hashtag in
your tweets as well so others can see their conversation)!
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