Romney campaign trying to make #WeBuiltIt happen
Update, 10:55 p.m.: Here's a useful lesson for those hoping to drive messaging on Twitter. The Romney campaign tried repeatedly to get #webuiltit to take off. But #IStandWithAnn, championed by a user with fewer than 1,000 followers, easily surpassed the campaign's synthetic viral campaign.
Original post:
In an effort that appears highly coordinated, tweets from Mitt Romney, Ann Romney and Paul Ryan all began using the hashtag #WeBuiltIt Tuesday evening ahead of Ann Romney's convention speech tonight. Hundreds of retweets propelled the tag to 450 mentions in a 15-minute period, the peak thus far.
The earliest instance of this hashtag that we can locate came from user @Tom_Shotz a week ago, but there is no apparent connection. It will be interesting to watch whether this sort of top-down hashtag generation from the campaign catches on widely.
Update, 6:56 p.m.: Yahoo News' Laura Davis points out that the campaign paid to promote a tweet with this hashtag as well.
