❊ Lebanese Prime Ministers Play with Twitter

A few days ago, ex PM Saad Hariri delighted some of his supporters by directly engaging with them in an informal Q&A session on Twitter. Starstruck supporters began asking him questions about everything from politics to Batman & Harley Davidson motorbikes.

It was a novelty in Lebanon, and it got people talking.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/HaririSaad/status/133234054593126401"]

But the party didn’t last long for Mr. Hariri because PM Najib Mikati has a strange habit of raining on his parades. The current Prime Minister was to have his own Twitter breakthrough: A public debate with the UK ambassador in Lebanon ahead of his meeting the British prime minister David Cameron. It was fascinating, useful and revealing discussion where the PM mixed policy with personal niceties..

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/Najib_Mikati/status/133168393066000385"]

Mr. Mikati’s Twitter excursion was so successful it won plaudits from normal Lebanese twitter users and the British Foreign Minister himself:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/WilliamJHague/status/133275538612690945"]

There’s a lot that can be said and deduced from how the former and current Prime Ministers use Twitter, so off the top of my head, here are some quick notes:

• Mr. Hariri was apparently tweeting on his own, and might regret some of the things he wrote (the FPM’s online forum is already making fun of his batman comment..)
• It was obvious that Mr. Mikati was supported by a sleek PR operation (only those tweets signed N.M. are his personal tweets. The rest was by his staff)
• The comparison between the two was inevitable
• Considering how out of the Lebanese mainstream Twitter is, it is odd that the PMs didn’t chose another medium like Facebook, which has a very high penetration among the Lebanese population
• All the tweets were in English (naturally), peppered with a tiny bit of Arabic
• Mr. Hariri did not take part of the Mikati-Fletcher discussion

In any case, this was all a breath of fresh air, at least for those of us who use Twitter. The real question is: What do these politicians (who have wide access to local and international media) achieve by interacting with us online. Is this a publicity gambit, or do they really want our feedback?