Tweeting about politics

Tweet! - your U.S. Senator has a message.

Students are following their favorite politicians' real-time thoughts on the social-networking site Twitter.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who admitted last year during the campaign to having never sent or received an e-mail, is now tweeting many times a day to his 341,720 followers.

"On my way to do CNN American Morning," he wrote yesterday.

Twitter is the third-largest social-networking site in America, according to U.S. web traffic analysis service Complete.com, which estimates that Twitter has about 6 million users.

More than 10 percent of them follow President Barack Obama.

Joseph Turow, associate dean for graduate studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, described Twitter as an important part of the modern public-relations environment.

He said Twitter is used both for sending messages and listening to other people in the "world of Twitter."

He said he does not know of any formal studies so far on how politicians are using it.

Penn Democrats President and College sophomore Jordan Levine, a former Daily Pennsylvanian advertising representative, said he uses Twitter to follow people working in politics.

He described how Democratic campaign worker Joe Trippi organized his "followers" to fast in protest over issues in Zimbabwe, solely using Twitter.

Levine said he also follows Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

He said she "tweets from the Senate floor - you can follow her stream of consciousness."

McCaskill tweeted, "just off the floor. Been voting since just before noon," yesterday, after what she described as "'voterama' ... slang for votes on dozens of budget amendmets," just a few hours earlier.

Levine said he thinks Twitter is more for politicians to communicate with reporters than constituents.

He added that "the audience is not huge," but the types of people who follow politicians are likely to have blogs or access to conventional media that reach millions.

Twitter is certainly not the only new-media genre that successful politicians are using said Mike Tate, College Republicans communications director, former Spin blogger and College junior.

Tate said students are more interested in Facebook than Twitter and that politicians "who want to win" have profiles on the site.

"New media won't win an election but you can't win an election without new media," he said, "politicians using Twitter are smart."

Using these sites is also a sign of being technologically savvy, he added, and some politicians, such as McCain, who are catching up now should have started a long time ago.

Senate nuances are not the only snippets of political life that Twitter has to offer.

On Monday, McCaskill wrote, "to my precious niece McKenzie: Miss you too! ... See you Easter! XXOO," for all the world to read.

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