In Mexico, politicians have began using social media to campaign. But they seem baffled as to how to deal with angry voters.
State Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, potentially the next presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), stopped using Twitter when voters got cranky. “Twitter demands more horizontal communication and more dialogue, more exposure to criticism,” says one blog that reviewed how Peña Nieto’s handlers chose Facebook, where a clique of fans is more acceptable.
But the one politician who has forged ahead on Twitter is Manuel Lopez Obrador, the 2012 presidential candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party. According to Rendon who measured both candidates use of Twitter, Lopez Obrador, is prolific in this medium. To date he has almost 56,000 followers.
If you’re measuring the number of followers, the winner is President Felipe Calderon, with 400,000 followers. But on Twitter, power and influence is measured by the amount of retweets and the winner in this category — despite having only 17,000 — followers is Gerardo Fernandez Noroña, a congressman for the leftist Workers Party PT. Fernandez Noroña’s appeal is that he argues with his followers; those who dare to contradict him are targeted with colorful language.
In the last two years, Twitter has become a big hit in Mexico. When it was launched few in Mexico thought it would take off. But in 2009, it had 32,000 accounts. By January 2010, this had grown to 146,000 accounts. By June 2010, the number had jumped to 1,835,372 accounts.
As media analyst and academic Maria Elena Meneses says, 2012, the year of the next presidential election, will be the year of Twitter in Mexico.
