European digital chief Neelie Kroes is ‘Master of Twitter’

13 Nov, 2012



After a spot of bad news last weekend (which involved having the laptops of her staff hacked at a conference in Azerbaijan) some good news now for Neelie Kroes, Europe’s Vice President of the European Commission and also our so called ‘digital chief’.

Jon Worth, a communications consultant who specializes in social media for politicians made a list of all the EU Commissioners who are on Twitter – or who pretend to are on Twitter. Of all the European commissioners using Twitter, Neelie Kroes is clearly the “Master”of European political Twitter use, he writes on his blog:

Neelie Kroes remains far ahead of the rest on every measure. She commands more than 55k followers, while no other Commissioner is beyond 20k, has developed her own style, and is happy to reply and retweet regularly.

She is an example, even beyond Brussels, of how a high level politician should use Twitter. The account is also a fair and accurate reflection of her as a person.

What I like about the list is that Worth adds who is actually using Twitter, who isn’t, and who’s pretending to be. Those are the people that he marks ‘claims to be’. (In his line of business, it’s probably unwise to flat out call them liars.)

The list also mentions which politicians are most likely to actually answer or retweet a tweet of ‘normal’ people. That’s actually a very useful metric for social media literacy, I think. Turns out that 12 of 18 EU Commissioners score less than 5 (out of 10) on this metric, meaning that most of them can’t be bothered with replying the hoi polloi. Next time a European politician complains about how the citizens of Europe don’t really understand what they’re doing, and that they’re so isolated, maybe we can point them to the list.

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Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/re-publica/7165216154/sizes/z/in/photostream/ (I realise it’s not very flattering, but it’s Creative Commons)

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About the author

Raf Weverbergh

Editor of whiteboard. Raf Weverbergh was a magazine journalist at Humo whose work appeared in magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, Mail on Sunday, Publico and South China Morning post before starting Whiteboard in 2012. He profiles entrepreneurs and businesses and loves to chat on Twitter, Linkedin or Skype (rafweverbergh).

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