Friday 20 February 2009

Twittered offside

Twitterers among you can follow us at twitter.com/thefabians: 869 of you are doing so.

Lord Iain Dale of the blogosphere has flagged us offside in his post today on the 'top 20 UK Political Blog Twitterers' because we are not an individual. That saves us from being sandwiched us between Alistair Campbell and John Prescott in 7th place. We'll try to get over it: what is interesting is that Dale's top ten includes four Labour bloggers, three of whom (those two and Derek Draper) were not yet blogging or twittering at new year, just two months ago.

(UPDATE: Iain Dale has kindly changed his mind after checking the video replay, so we are now to be found in that Campbell-Prescott twitter sandwich of what has become a top 25 list. Interestingly, four of his top five Labour twitterers primarily have offline presences and reputations which they have recently tried to take online (Campbell, Prescott, Fabians and Derek Draper), while Tom Watson has had a longer established online presence, while those on the right tend to have reputations which have been primarily developed through the internet. UPDATE ENDS).

Another new development yesterday is that we have a new Facebook page and so are encouraging members and friends to join as 'fans'.

The existing Fabian Society group will remain live, but the features of this new NGO page will enable us to make more use of Facebook, linking up with the blog and twitter feed, invite members and supporters to events, and host discussions. We want to encourage the 1600+ members of the group to become a 'fan' of the new page, which will be the main focus of Facebook activities from the national society HQ.

A search for Fabian Society on Facebook will throw up several different Fabian voluntary groups - Young Fabians, Women's Network, Welsh Fabians, and a sprinkling of local societies from the LSE, Bexley, Norwich all the way to Sydney University - so you can join those relevant to you.

And a quick thank you to Michael Haddon at City University and to Katy Taylor for their efforts in helping Rachael Jolley to develop and sharpen our online and social networking presence, so that we can engage with and try to help spark the new social and political movements of our age. The new reach and engagement is a good thing in itself. It's leading more people to join us as members too, and is helping us to push Fabian membership towards an all-time high.

As ever, ideas about how we could use these spaces are welcome - here, on facebook, by email or, if you prefer, by second class post to Dartmouth Street.

1 comment:

Iain Dale said...

OK, I have had a rethink on the basis that most of your twitters do indeed relate to the blog.