Twitter as a campaigning tool
The possibility of using Twitter as a campaigning tool was recently tested by LabourStart.
We were inspired by the example of American Rights at Work (ARAW), a union-supported campaigning organisation, that has recently taken on the American Chamber of Commerce (the equivalent of the CBI here in Britain) using Twitter.
ARAW took advantage of a new web service called Act.ly (http://act.ly) that allows the instant creation of Twitter campaigns. (Their slogan is "Tweet change.") They succeeded very quickly in mounting one of the largest campaigns ever using the microblogging service, with over 1,200 messages sent.
We decided to try the same thing in support of our more traditional global web and email campaign in support of striking Canadian workers at Vale Inco, a mining giant.