Opinion: Mayor Adams is Nothing Special on Twitter
The Oregonian today, over on OregonLive.com, published a cute little piece about Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams and his use of Twitter. As per usual, the author complimented the mayor on his use of Twitter, pointing out that Adams tweets more than most big city mayors. This wasn’t the first time someone kissed the mayor’s virtual ass on this subject. It was also not the first time that a reporter missed the real story.
I know others have criticized his use of Twitter but I have a different beef with the mayor. I noticed early on that many of the people that follow the mayor on Twitter are not from Portland or even Oregon! Why does this matter, you ask? Because his message may be getting out, but not to his constituents. And if that is the case, is his use of Twitter really anything to brag about?
Based on an analysis created at peoplebrowsr.com, here is what I discovered about the mayor’s followers:
- Only 16% identify themselves as being from Oregon (2.7% have an unknown state)
- Only 39% are even from the US
I also learned from my analysis at peoplebrowsr.com that there is an overall negative sentiment surrounding Mayor Sam Adams on Twitter. In fact, 68% of tweets that mention “@mayorsamadams” (his username) have a negative sentiment. Sure, it is a computer algorithm but compare that to Mayor Gavon Newsom (which the Oregonian did) and you’ll see that the popular Mayor of San Fransisco has a negative sentiment of just 1.8%, based on that same algorithm (Bloomberg is at 67%).
Recently I reached out to the mayor on Twitter, asking him if he used a service or software to help him gain followers. I asked because the most common way to get followers on Twitter is to follow others first in hopes that they will follow back. Software and services have popped up to help people do this automatically, blindly going out and following other Twitter uses. I suspect that Mayor Adams did such a thing, following people from around the world and hoping they would follow back.
The mayor never responded. No surprise.
So while Mayor Sam Adams spends many hours on Twitter, tweeting about pot-holes, leaf removal, abandoned dogs and gun control to his non-Oregon followers, I ask one thing:
If the Portland Mayor Tweets and no one from Oregon is around to hear it, does he still make a sound?
Sorry Jeff, but this looks a little disingenuous to me. That big 53% that's in "unknown" countries is a result of the absence of structured data around Twitter user's locations. It seems very unlikely that a big percentage of those people do not in fact live in Portland. It also seems unlikely to me that the Mayor would spend his time or money scamming Twitter for spammy dumb followers in non-specific locations.
Why is it unlikely that the unknowns don't live in Portland? My guess is that the unknowns follow the same distribution of the knowns. Regardless, if we remove the unknowns from the analysis, he still has fewer than 50% of his US followers in Oregon (44.7% to be exact, up from 41.6% when unknowns are included). Of all of his followers, removing the unknown from both the country and state lists, his Oregon followers are just 36.6% of his total.
As for the idea of him spending time/money on a service to get followers…..I'd personally prefer that he did that rather than spend his own time following and following back tens of thousands of followers. I am sure you realize how time consuming that would be.
But if he didn't use a service/software to get all these followers, how did he manage to rack up so many non-oregon followers? He isn't that well known or popular outside of Oregon, let alone the US.
If you buy that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true: the most likely person to follow Adams is a portlander, but most people don’t have structured location data. That those who do happen to be less that 50% from PDX doesn’t change that those who don’t remain most likely to be portlanders. So it’s not safe to assume the ratios would remain the same. I think
Unless his account manager was buying followers. In that case though, why stop at less than 30k? And really, you think the mayor would waste his time with that?
Why wouldn’t the unknowns follow the same distribution as they knowns? I don’t see any statistical reason why they would be more likely to be Portlanders than those that have identified their location.
I have had his staffers respond to me on Twitter before regarding his account and they have told me multiple times that he manages his account 100% on his own….no help from his office. Considering, I’d imagine it would be more time consuming for him to gain and/or follow back 30,000 people than it would be to just use a service.
To date, he as still not responded to me and answered the question. Until he denies that he used a software/service to get all those followers, I personally think it is likely he did.