Are you on Twitter? We are, and so are a lot of fellow Vancouverites.

Last week, 6S Marketing director and co-founder Chris Breikss compiled his list of Vancouver’s top 20 Twitterers. The Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw published Breikss’s list on her blog ‘Digital Life’ and added a short bio for each of the popular tweeps. Check it out.

The winners for the annual Advertising Age Davey awards have just been announced. Invoke was nominated for 3 awards and won 2 for the memelabs Wells Fargo Someday Stories campaign. Invoke won Silver in the Branded Content: Video/Films/Movie category and Silver in the Not-for-profit category. This award follows up the New Media BC’s People’s Choice 2008 Popvox Award for Best User Generated Content or Crowdsourced Content Site for memelabs that Invoke won this past April.

Posted by Jenn Lowther

This is going to be the first in a series of posts looking at various industries and how they are utilizing twitter. If you are unfamiliar with twitter, I recapped what it is in this previous post.

At Invoke, there are many of us who use twitter on a daily basis, and as its popularity has risen, I’ve found that we are utilizing twitter more and more for inhouse products (check out @invoke, @memelabs, @claytorial and @eatsolution) and for clients.  This got us wondering what industries/verticals are using twitter? So in this series of posts, we are going to have a quick look at various industries/vertical and see who’s using twitter.

I thought that given that the US Federal Election is coming up in 4 days, that this would be the perfect topic for our Weekly Twitter Usage Review.

Candidates for President and VP (Followers, Updates, Twinfluence, Twitter Rank)

• Barack Obama 110,855  252  100%   #78
• Joe Biden 2,693    67  99.7%  #606
• John McCain 4,462    25  99.9%  #169
• Sarah Palin (unofficial)     1,081 254  99.1%  #1,993

Fake Candidates for President and VP Accounts

• Fake Barack Obama 497     117  97.2%  #6,027
• Fake Joe Biden 1,113     109  99.1%  #1,992
• Fake John McCain 2,175  1,775  99.6%  #   810
• Fake Sarah Palin 7,579     556   100%  #      71

Democratic Primary Season Candidates

• Hillary Clinton
• John Edwards
• Chris Dodd

Republican Primary Season Candidates

• Fred Thompson

Ancillary Election Accounts

• Joe the Plumber (fake)

I’ve been quite impressed overall with how twitter has been used in the US election. I have to give top credit to the way that Barack Obama has embraced twitter and has amassed an amazing following and keeps his followers regularly updated with the current action happening on the campaign trail.  My favorites to follow though, come from the Fake Candidates category. Both Fake Sarah Palin and Fake John McCain make me laugh daily, the personalities behind these accounts are pure comic genius.

Whatever you political leanings, if you are an American, make sure you flex your democratic muscles on November 4th and rock the vote!

As a quick aside, Canada recently wrapped up our federal election and, along with the US politicians, Canadian politicians got into the twitter action. The following are the Canadian Politicians that had twitter accounts:

• NDP Leader Jack Layton (English & French)
• Prime Minister Stephen Harper (English & French)
• Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe (French)
• Green Party Leader Elizabeth May (English)
• National Director of the Liberal Party of Canada, Greg Fergus (English)

My twitter friend MasterMaq did a great write up of the Canadian Polititians on twitter (the above list is from his post).

Election 2008: Twitter Usage Review

Posted by Jenn Lowther

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As a follow up to the Blogathon Invoke participated in we received a very thoughtful thank-you from Plan Canada for the $2500 we raised which also acts as a promotional piece in their journal for their fund raising tools. We have no problem being made an example of:

Chances are if you are a company, you have an online presence - even if you’re not the one that has created it. Consumers are alive and active online and are, in all likelihood, talking about your company. Companies need to be proactive in managing their online presence and a vital component of this is an interactive PR campaign.

Interactive PR is the use of online tools and technologies like: search engines, social bookmarking, new media relations, and blogging, to disseminate information about your company online. Allowing you to communicate directly with the general public, consumers, and potential prospects.

The following are key elements of any successful interactive PR campaign: