Final Word from Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Václav Moravec is a regular Twitter user and often posts several Tweets a day. Yet ODS's new Twitter-based election campaign - #Volím_pravici - hasn't even fully registered with him. In his interview with Miroslava Němcová of ODS on Impuls on Mon., he failed to mention Twitter by name, and when he did mention the ODS campaign, he got it wrong. He said "Volte pravici" ("Vote for the Right!," instead of "I vote for the Right"), which as of this morning didn't even exist as a Twitter hashtag. ODS's campaign is no doubt clever (Petr Koubský called it the "best online idea in the history of Czech politics"), but it's main effect so far is to confirm to obsessive "Tweeters" that their preferred medium has growing influence. Most Czechs have never heard of Twitter, much less of a hashtag. By using a hashtag in its campaign, ODS is being bold and esoteric at the same time. It's almost as if it's admitting that its political base has been reduced to a relatively small group of diehards. Too bad for it that they don't always overlap with the Twitter fanatics. [Czech Republic early elections]
Glossary of difficult words
Tweet - a message posted on Twitter;
to register - (usual with a negative) to make an impression on a person's mind;
hashtag - the symbol #, followed by a word or phrase, allowing users of Twitter to easily locate discussion about the given word or phrase;
Tweeter - a user of Twitter;
esoteric - intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or interest;
political base - the main element of political support;
diehard - one who stubbornly resists change or tenaciously adheres to a seemingly hopeless or outdated course;
overlap - to partly coincide with.