Nearly everyone seems to be on Twitter these days. And one of its fastest growing uses has to be in the political sphere, where we find members of Congress tweeting live from President Obama’s speeches. So it should be no surprise that the mayor of the city in which Twitter (the company) resides, San Francisco, [...]
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is heading to Twitter’s headquarters tomorrow to meet with their team. How do I know? He tweeted about it. And so did Twitter chief executive Evan Williams.
From what I can gather, it’s just a general meeting to determine how San Francisco’s government can best use technology like Twitter. Both Newsom and Williams are asking for feedback from their Twitter followers (Newsom has 39,701 and Williams has 239,128 — but who’s counting? Yes, sadly, everyone.) to use in the meeting.
I sent a message over to Twitter to see if this meeting was anything more, and I’ll update when I hear back. Perhaps Newsom is getting some tips on how best to use the service to run an effective campaign for governor of California in 2010? It seemed to work pretty well for Barack Obama, Twitter’s most popular user (with over 400,000 followers), who has neglected the service since taking office.
Last week, Obama invited a group of entrepreneurs, including Twitter’s Williams, to the White House to discuss the economic crisis. Williams tweeted it out beforehand and was bombarded by suggestions to tell the President.
Newsom is actually a fairly prolific, if not redundant, Twitter user. He signed up in late December and has so far sent out nearly 200 tweets. Of course the majority of those seem to be “thank you,” (first for praise of a recent op-ed piece, then more recently in response to congratulations about his wife’s pregnancy). But he’s also been using it for the same reason a lot of good Twitter users do: for self promotion and to post mundane observations such as, “Just finished running through the Presidio down to Golden Gate Bridge– hard not to love this city!”
He seems to prefer updating Twitter through text message, the web and the iPhone app TwitterFon.
The mayor also does seem to do a good job of responding to questions sent to him. And he’s fairly likely to follow you back if you follow him — he follows over 13,000 people.
Twitter secured a new $35 million round of funding last month. And while it’s working towards a viable business plan, it claims that gaining users is more important right now.
You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Tam Vo, Camille Ricketts, Dan Kaplan and Matt Marshall. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.
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