4. It’s nice to have a lot of followers, but not critical. If even a small handful of people start tweeting about the same thing in an organized manner (and use hashtags), it will look like a movement and others will quickly jump on board.
5. Just because a politician doesn’t seem to be paying attention, he or she probably is. They are very sensitive to how people perceive them in public. And if they aren’t paying attention, folks around them are and they’ll get the word anyway.

Twitter is a great tool to keep in your online political tool chest. It’s not going to win most of your political battles, but it certainly can come in handy from time to time.

twitter's great when you need...

4. It’s nice to have a lot of followers, but not critical. If even a small handful of people start tweeting about the same thing in an organized manner (and use hashtags), it will look like a movement and others will quickly jump on board.
5. Just because a politician doesn’t seem to be paying attention, he or she probably is. They are very sensitive to how people perceive them in public. And if they aren’t paying attention, folks around them are and they’ll get the word anyway.

Twitter is a great tool to keep in your online political tool chest. It’s not going to win most of your political battles, but it certainly can come in handy from time to time.

twitter's great when you need fast. but it probably only works for people who already trust you to give decent "calls to action" (liberals on #alpolitics might be a LOT more skeptical, or downright unmoved simply because of someone's rep as a republican)

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on Rs and Ds
Submitted by Stephen Gordon on Thu, 06/11/2009 - 09:55.

True, Dems aren't as likely to help if you are a Republican and vice versa. However, both of these examples were issue-related and even the latter bill has some Dem support (50 + Dem cosponsors last time I checked).

The #alpolitics tag is helpful for another key purpose, though. A lot of reporters, politicians and bloggers hang out there -- so they get the message that we are working hard on something.