Mark Blevis

Thanks a million to Claude Boucher for stopping by and alerting me in a comment to my last post that “French-language tweeps have decided to use #fed2011 rather than #elxn41 to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. #cv11 is also used for bilingual discussions.”

I’ve run run those hashtags through Sysomos MAP as a unit since there are significantly fewer Tweets using those hashtags — 366 for today as of 8:45pmET.

Expecting the traffic to be largely connected to French Canada, Quebec specifically, I was surprised to see references to Edmonton (YEG is the Edmonton city code). As I dug deeper, I discovered the #fed2011 and #cv11 hashtags are also being used in English language Tweets about the election (albeit significantly fewer than the primary #elxn41). Edmonton is where NDP leader Jack Layton is kicking off his election tour. As expected, none of the 14 Edmonton-related Tweets were in French.

In fact, it seems only 24 Tweets using either of the identified hashtags are in French.

Please alert me to any hashtags used by the French-speaking community so I can include them in my research and monitoring.