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Labour Party Members Researched
The Labour Party accounts for a number of Members of Parliament, although the focus on research centralized around eight members of the current Labour Party. The eight members that were researched were Tom Watson, Linda Gilroy, Diana Johnson, Chris Bryant, Ben Bradshaw, David Drew, Anne Snelgrove and Mike Foster. Below is a table showing the varying numbers of followers for each member.

Tom Watson is a renowned member, evident by the 5,934 citizens who currently follow his tweets since first using Twitter in March 2008. He has since accumulated a total of 3727 status updates. Compared to other Members of Parliament that have been searched Watson is following the most and has the most followers, along with international followers from 162 locations.
Other members are, Johnson who since starting Twitter in August of 2009 she has acquired 237 followers and is currently following 19, with a total number of 42 status updates. Bradshaw, who has few followers with 32, is considered to be the Culture Secretary, but has had a recent spike in twitter use because of a find of gold in the Midlands. Gilroy is an active Twitter user with 684 followers predominantly from the United Kingdom region, since creating a Twitter account in March 2009. Bryant is also another active member with 625 followers on Twitter, those of who are mainly from the United Kingdom with a few dispersed throughout the world.
Other members such as Snelgrove, have used Twitter minimally since first joining Twitter in January 2009. Drew is another member that has had minimal activity with his Twitter account with 205 followers and only 88 status updates. While Foster has maintained a steady use of his Twitter account with 231 followers since using the service in July 2009 and has since acquired a total number of 148 status updates.

Members of Parliament using Twitter
There were nine types of message codes that were used in analyzing the tweets consisting of: local, join me, policy, refer me, refer others, criticism, party, interaction, as well as other for miscellaneous messages. Below is a table conveying the number of messages for each of members according to the message codes.

In terms of local discussion, Johnson who represents a particular district has tweets focusing on local events and policies. While there were also a small number of tweets referencing local matters from Bryant, Gilroy, Drew, Watson and Foster.
For tweets representing a member’s call for citizens to join them at a function or to hear them speak, there were few members who utilized their twitter accounts as a method of communication for this type of announcement. There was an apparent trend in which those who had a higher number of followers tended to use this join me concept (Bryant, Gilroy and Watson) as compared to those who did not and do not have as many followers.
One of the surprising factors associated with tracking the types of messages communicated via twitter was the limited use of promoting policy. Members of Parliament seemed reluctant to promote actual policies as there were only eight tweets referencing policy, excluding Watson. Watson was one member that has used his twitter account to communicate about policies regarding file sharing, with 105 tweets on policy.
Rather than actually use twitter to discuss policies, some parliament members used twitter to refer to themselves (Refer Me) and their individual views and statements. Although there was this option there were very few who actually used this form of communication, some included Gilroy and Watson.
Referring to others was a common form of communication compared to referring themselves. Six of the eight members had tweets that referred others, meaning that they were directing their followers to more information either from another person or another place. The most common way that the members redirected their followers was usually by posting a tweet that consisted of another website with more information regarding a certain topic.
Criticism within tweets were a common theme amongst the members, although they did not account for a large number of tweets, there were still five of the eight members who did have some form of criticism within their tweets. Bryant was one of the member in which nine of his 43 tweets were referencing a form of criticism.
The eight members of the Labour Party that were searched actually had very few tweets focusing on party politics. Rather than spending time on discussing another party most members focused mainly on their own areas of interest. Foster was one member who had referenced party politics with three of his 16 tweets discussing party politics as well as couple references from Watson.
The most common type of message on Twitter used by the Parliament Members, was interaction, meaning that the members were interacting directly with others and or constituents. Six of the eight members had used a form of interaction with Watson (91 out of 435) and Bryant (19 out of 43) being the predominant users.
For the other category for messages that did not fit the description of any of the eight other codes only half of the members researched had a message that was considered other, but this code was used minimally.

Citizen Responses to Parliament Members
The eight Members of Parliament researched tweeted on varying topics in which they were discussing but topics all were related to policies that each of the members were dedicated to within their certain interest areas. The citizen’s responses to the members were analyzed using seven different types of messages consisting of: insult, criticism policy, praise policy, conversation, thanks-congrats, refer and repeat. It should be noted that due to an extensive number of tweets for some members such as Tom Watson a sampling process was implemented in which every 10th message was coded until 100 messages had been read. Below is a table with the breakdown of coded messages for what citizens were tweeting about in regards to each member.

	Insult	Criticism Pol.	Praise Pol.	Conversation	Thanks	Refer	Repeat
Tom Watson	2	6	1	37	4	11	39
Linda Gilroy	2	2	4	9	25	8	49
Chris Bryant	2	2	4	15	34	15	28
Diana Johnson	N/A	N/A	N/A	2	1	1	2
David Drew	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Anne Snelgrove	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	3	N/A
Ben Bradshaw	67	11	2	81	15	6	43
Mike Foster	N/A	1	N/A	N/A	N/A	1	4

The tone of the messages is evident in how many insults a member had as compared to the thanks and congratulation posts that a given member received. Ben Bradshaw was the only member who actually had more insulting messages than messages expressing thanks and congratulations with 67 insults as compared to only 15 thanking and or congratulating him. While Bradshaw had messages with more of a negative tone, Bryant received positive citizen feedback with 34 messages thanking and congratulating him, and only two insulting him.
The messages revealed how citizens have also used twitter in order to convey their praise for a policy and their criticism of policy for the interest area of each particular member. Tom Watson and Ben Bradshaw are members who had more messages referring to criticism regarding their policy, with Watson focusing on internet restrictions and Bradshaw who was found to be making inappropriate public announcements. It is also important to note that three members, Johnson, Snelgrove and Drew, did not receive any tweets from citizens regarding their policies, revealing that Twitter is not being used as a direct form of conveying opinion for all eight members.
Although direct communication reflecting policy was not consistently prevalent for each of the members, the area of conversation was a common message, where tweets reflected interaction between member and constituents. All of the members except for three had messages consisting of conversation, which consisted of dialogue between each members interest area and then some messages pertaining to the members personal life. For the most part these messages were considerate of the members and were not inappropriate for the style of communication in using tweets as a form of discussion.
In terms of consistent discussion between members of parliament and constituents, there were messages that referred members to acknowledge something that a constituent deemed important and repeated tweets showed the duration of some conversations between a constituent and a member. For some of the members, like Watson and Gilroy, the majority of tweets from citizens were repeated tweets revealing topics that sparked interest and demonstrated the value that both members see in what citizens are commenting on.

Most Personable Member
The most personable member of parliament within the eight members of the Labour Party that were searched is Tom Watson, not solely based on his overwhelming presence on Twitter and his number of followers, but also because of the particular tone that he consistently uses. It is a tone that reveals the communication of emotion and thought as compared to just relaying information and fact strictly. He does not use his twitter account solely for the purpose of promoting his own policy and the Labour Party, but to also comment on his personal life and popular current events.
In order to demonstrate the personable side of Tom Watson the comments below provide insight as to the person he is and the character he encompasses. It is evident that at certain times he has to promote policy and support his own views, but he is also capable of infusing some humor into his commentary. The quotations below are messages posted by Watson reflecting his personable nature, which can viewed in the xls file.
Quotations: Status Updates for Tom Watson

	Local	Join Me	Policy	Refer-Me	Refer-Other	Criticism	Party	Interaction	Other
Tom Watson	4	N/A	105	12	77	57	16	91	72
Linda Gilroy	3	4	N/A	2	5	1	1	1	3
Chris Bryant	1	4	N/A	N/A	6	9	1	19	3
Diana Johnson	2	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N /A	N/A	N/A	N/A
David Drew	2	N/A	3	N/A	N/A	1	N/A	1	N/A
Anne Snelgrove	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	2	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Ben Bradshaw	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	6	2	N/A	N/A	N/A
Mike Foster	2	1	5	N/A	N/A	N/A	3	1	4