I’ve been critical of team Crist’s efforts on Twitter over the months, watching as they’ve squandered their chances to build and maintain a dialog with voters during the run-up to the primary. But in July, activity on social media picked up for Crist:

Click to enlarge.  Ironic colors courtesy of Excel.

About mid-July the activity on Crist’s Twitter mentions started picking up, albeit raggedly. By the end of July, thanks to a slowdown in governor Scott’s mentions, Crist had pulled almost even with Scott.

To be clear, much of Crist’s relative gains are due to Scott’s slowdown; Scott could kick it back up and leave Crist behind.  But Crist has also been able to boost his mentions back into the 1000-1500 a day range, so there’s a chance for him to move up as well and to start to dominate the discussion on Twitter.

Will Crist do that? With Nan Rich continuing to be a distant second in both polls and social media, it’s clear that there’s no sense of urgency for Crist.  But this opportunity may not come around again …

As we’re getting closer to the August primary, we can see that twitter conversations about the three main candidates are continuing:

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But they’re not generating any excitement, that’s for sure, especially for Charlie Crist.  In months previous, Crist has repeatedly broken through the 1K-per-day mark and often well beyond; his mentions staying below 1K in June seems to indicate a lack of building enthusiasm.

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With Florida’s legislative season underway in April, the Twitter buzz about the gubernatorial candidates picked up quite a bit, and most of the pick-up occurred in Rick Scott’s mentions:

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At the same time bills were getting passed and the discussion turned from theoretical to actual, Rick Scott’s sentiment also rose significantly:

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This suggests to me that discussion of the work of being governor is better than discussion of the politics of being governor for Scott.  It’s been my (unscientific) observation that Scott’s team tries to keep focus on the day-in-day-out aspects of being governor.  Maybe the flurry of new laws will cement that practical focus for him.  And maybe all Scott has to do is keep looking executive, rather than political, to prevail in November.

Still, I’m hesitant to read too much into all this until everyone goes home from Tallahassee and the discussion returns to the race itself.  The first couple of days in May show the spike at the end of April was a bit of an anomaly, so we will have to wait a while to see what the new normal is.

It would be nice to think that the Crist campaign is prepared to pounce on Scott in social media.  But as I’ve said before, the campaign is not very strong socially. Not much has changed in April, so I will just say those criticisms still stand: inconsistent level of effort, no real strategy towards content, etc. The legislative session gives him a reason (maybe not a great reason) to lay low now, but if he doesn’t come guns ablazin’ afterwards he’s putting his candidacy at risk.  God knows his “give me money because I need money” emails aren’t going to win this for him…

With March in the books, let’s look at how Florida’s gubernatorial candidates faired on Twitter:

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The pattern that established itself at the end of February is holding up — Rick Scott is dominating on Twitter, with only occasional bursts of conversation about Charlie Crist.  And Nan Rich is still not getting much love from the twitterati.

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