by Daniel Hope
Hugo Chavez believes the time has come for him to embrace Social Media and try to fit his notorious verbosity into 140 characters or less; Rory Carroll at the Guardian is skeptical. The Venezuelan president recently began tweeting as @Chavezcandanga with his first tweet reading:
“Hi, how’s it going? Here I am, just like I said I would be, at midnight. I’m going to Brazil. I’m so happy to work on behalf of Venezuela. We will overcome!!”
Granted it probably lost some of it’s revolutionary zeal in the translation. So far Chavez has 50,000+ followers but is only following 5. Come on, Hugo show some follow-back love!
Some time back I donated a Twitter account to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a show of international goodwill. I hoped that the transparency and progressiveness of the social network would rub off on the man. But, alas he ignored my offer and when everyone was making their Twitter icons green to support the Iranian uprising he was forced to sit quietly on the social networking sidelines.
So it’s good to see at least one of these Axis of Evil types are finally coming around to the power of Social Media.
In the comments: Who else believes social media has transformative power?
1 response so far ↓
1 Astrid // Apr 28, 2010 at 1:33 pm
I have seen what social media did for a company like Dell.
I wonder what it would be like to ghost tweet for a revolutionary dictator?
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