Much has been said in recent days the use of social media on the occasion of the earthquake in Haiti: Nielsen figures to support, USA Today suggests for example that 3% of the notes published on blogs in the hours that followed made reference to the disaster, and the Red Cross had 100 times the number of new followers (subscribers to his account) on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Immediately after the earthquake, more than 1,500 Facebook status per minute were referring to the disaster, while many news sites have been using Twitter stream for their coverage, users have created hashtags (keywords) on the site to facilitate the transmission of information, or that the singer Wyclef Jean launched on his behalf an appeal for donations, propelling Yele (the name of the association) at the top of most used words.The disaster was also an opportunity for a coming-out policy: the first ever sent by twitt Barack Obama, paradoxically, not on his account ( @ BarackObama , fueled by its communication services) but that of the Red Cross (event immortalized here , here and also here ).

An oddity that reflects the difficulty of using Twitter for the most popular politicians, who have an extremely broad mandate monopolizing or need to “cross” the different social categories. In France, those who pass the year, in addition to having found the right tone, tend to face the management of one or two specific communities (for geeks Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet , the “PSophiles” for Benoit Hamon . ..) and have chosen to “follow” a limited number of accounts (accounts “followed” automatically update the screen and their owners can send messages directly to the address in question).

The account of Obama himself, “read” 700,000 people, 20% of those who follow (0.2% for NKM, Hamon 4%), an enormous figure for a politician: when we add the employment Time dementia and a range of topics and potential partners very large, we say that we are not ready to see twitter itself from the situation room of the White House. As one article to be published Thursday Challenges, the Elysium services promise an account of Nicolas Sarkozy for months: given the constraints of the exercise for a head of state, they will work hard to make it attractive with the heart of service target.