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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After flatlining most of the month, Charlie Crist’s campaign has started to show some life on Twitter towards the end of January.  Nan Rich’s campaign continues to limp along, however.

But when you look at the charts, the power of incumbency becomes strikingly apparent.  In January, there was a 1 day peak for Rick Scott of over 13,000 mentions on Twitter:

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Over 12,000 of those mentions were in regards to a proclamation about sleep apnea. Still, even without that spike, we can see that at no point was Rick Scott really lagging in the conversation, and on almost every day he was leading it, sometimes strongly.

I’ll throw up a logarithmic plot so we can see what was happening to Crist and Rich throughout the month:

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What we can see is that towards the end of the month Charlie Crist was closing in on 1000 mentions a day — Rick Scott territory — while Nan Rich was struggling to stay above 10 mentions a day.  Let’s be clear, if you need a log plot to be seen, you’re in trouble.

The big uptick in Charlie Crist’s mentions occurred about January 20th, when Jim Messina joined the Crist campaign. As much of the discussion on Twitter was inside baseball, it will be interesting to see if the mentions keep coming once there’s no net new campaign organization news.

Charlie Crist is still flailing at Twitter, unfortunately.  In January, he averaged slightly less than one tweet a day.  Rick Scott, on the other hand, averaged almost 7 tweets a day.  It is a competition and Crist is still not showing up for the game.

Another, more mechanical problem is that Crist changed his Twitter user id from @charliecristfl to @charliecrist.   I’m not sure when it happened, but the way it was done is problematic.  People who are looking for and/or mentioning his old account are going to get lost in Twitterdom.  Yes, if you had followed his old account you will automatically be following his new account, but Charlie Crist needs to do a lot better than just to hang on to his old followers. And right now, if you google “Charlie Crist Twitter”, the first hit points you to his old user id — which someone has taken over and has zero tweets. That makes a bad impression.

Let’s hope, for Charlie Crist’s sake, that the recent hiring of Teddy Goff to advise the campaign is the start of a more savvy social media strategy.