Well after pretty much zero speculation, today April 6th 2010, Gordon Brown announced that the next UK general election would be on May 6th 2010. So my question would be, as this is the 1st general election to be fought after the birth of Twitter, what if any effect could Twitter have?

To answer that question, you really need to look at what is one of the main benefits of Twitter. Without any doubt, Twitter allows people, to listen and then engage with other people.

Twitter allows you to tell us who you are, not just what you do..

This can be particularly useful in an election. I am not a political person. I acutally think that by and large all the parties policies are pretty much the same, with just some minor difference along the way…

But what is massively different are the people. What are the candidates all about, what are their hobbies, their passions, their likes, their dislikes, are they listeners or just broadcasting, do they have charisma, are they interesting people, are they interested in serving the community and so on..

Twitter would allow them to really engage with their community, really demonstrate who they are, and why we should bother to turn out and vote for them. It would really allow them to listen to our issues, our grievances, and more importantly answer us..and make us feel special and listened to, rather than being ignored…

But alas, I am probably living in a dream world.. Most of them have hardly heard of Twitter, and those that have, just spout out the pre approved messages and tweets as they are told to do.. This is such a tragedy..

Rather than list all the MP’s on Twitter, there is a fab website called Tweetminster which has loads of interesting info about all the MP’s etc..