On the back of a story on this blog, Nicola Young complained to the Auditor General over Celia Wade-Brown’s use of the @WellingtonMayor twitter account during the campaign period. This week it has become public that Wade-Brown was instructed to stop using it and has now publicly highlighted that she will be using the @CeliaforMayor… which seemed like a good result.
However, while Wade-Brown may have given the impression she has put the official @WellingtonMayor account on hold, and started a whole new campaign account, it appears that she actually hasn’t. Instead, if you try to visit @WellingtonMayor, you will find it missing instead of on hold. So it looks like she has just changed the name of the account – thereby keeping all 1500 mayoral followers and converting them to political followers.
This seems to be an effort to give the impression that she is not using the office of mayor to campaign, as per the recommendations set out by the Auditor General, while at the same time directly tapping into a network of Wellingtonians built on the basis of connecting with the Mayor of Wellington City, to help her campaign.
This is exactly what Boris Johnson did in the London race and we mentioned that he had used this tactic in the earlier article. Johnson was forced to backdown and his case provides the perfect precedent for Charlie Inggs, the Wellington Electoral Officer, to act – it will be interesting to see if Young pushes again on this issue.
Either way, I’d sooner Wade-Brown copied some of Boris’s other actions such as the excellent London bike hire which seems to be a far better way of promoting cycling than daily mayoral-helmet-hair.
WCC Watch 
I’m not necessarily sure that the account has been renamed. There was a period when both @CeliaForMayor and @WellingtonMayor both existed.
I just attempted to register a new user account on Twitter, using the @WellingtonMayor handle, and was unable to do so, suggesting that the account had been deleted – Twitter allows you 30 days or so to change your mind and reactivate the account, before it’s permanently deleted. So they likely prevent new users from claiming those usernames in this period.
Migrated accounts don’t have this 30 day period though, hence why some like Elizabeth Marvelly claimed @MarvellousMusic straight after migrating to @LizzieMarvelly.
Hope my forensic work is of assistance.
It would be a great result if that was the case – but I dont get why you wouldnt just leave the Mayoral account open – it is still an appropriate and important channel for official (non-campaign) comms, particularly with all the quakes.
But if they did exist at the same time, then it looks like she has done the right thing.
I think she may have had that account, including the followers, from last time she was running for mayor?
Let’s hope that is the case – but from memory (which can be wrong!) she used @celiawbnz last time
@WellingtonMayor was registered by Jack Yan during the 2010 elections and gifted to Celia after the election.
For a while, she was tweeting on both the @celiawbnz and @WellingtonMayor account. All the followers of @WellingtonMayor have been since the 2010 election, pretty much, so those followers weren’t from her 2010 campaign – they would’ve been from the @celiawbnz account.