Online campaigns generally have a very short half-life. I’ve observed and written about many examples of this over the last few years. During last year’s federal election, I took to calling this the This Too Shall Pass Effect since most examples of this were connected to a headache for a candidate or campaign somewhere. The cure? A few cycles of Tylenol and patience. People quickly lose interest. People quickly move on to the next thing. People quickly forget. It’s the ADD nature of the web, particularly as driven by fast moving streams such as Twitter.
It’s hard to say how much of a headache #TellVicEverything caused Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. I suspect it offered him a lot of comic relief and a distraction from the @VikiLeaks30 account which was being used to overtly humiliate him. In fact, during an interview with Evan Solomon, Mr. Toews talked about how funny and creative many of the #TellVicEverything tweets were and how CBC should do a show on them. That was during the same interview in which he revealed there are some critical sections of the targeted Bill C-30 with which he’s not familiar.
Anyway, it seems #TellVicEverything has served its purpose and run its course. After a steep rise and steady decline, 40,066 tweets as of 5:30pmET today, the Twitter campaign has dropped well beyond its half-life. Something else will take its place soon enough, I’m sure. And that, too, will pass.
Analysis performed using Sysomos MAP.
comments