Chicagoist's Top 11 for 2011: @MayorEmanuel

By Chuck Sudo in News on Dec 28, 2011 8:30PM

Let's face it: Rahm Emanuel was the frontrunner in the mayoral race from the moment he resigned as White House Chief of Staff, which made what we dubbed "The Countdown to Rahmageddon" anticlimactic by the time Emanuel embarked on his handshaking tour of the CTA's "L" stations.

But it was Dan Sinker's "@MayorEmanuel" Twitter saga that provided the mystery, excitement and water cooler conversation lacking from the mayoral campaign. Playing off of Emanuel's reputation as a foul-mouthed, quick-tempered politician, Sinker crafted a story that showed people the possibilities of Twitter beyond a space to share what you ate for lunch or where you're spending last call. Sinker showed that Twitter could be used as a literary device or a crowd-sourcing tool for media.

Fans of the feed were rabid and couldn't get enough of Quaxelrod, Hambone, Carl the Intern and David Axelrod's Honda Civic. So were detractors who either thought "@MayorEmanuel" was either nothing more than someone using the word "fuck" a lot, or as an affront to the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, or as a ploy for media attention.

Ploy or no, Sinker got all the media attention he could handle and more, once he outed himself to The Atlantic. The real Emanuel — as masterful a political marketer as any we've ever witnessed — used Sinker's outing to show, at the very least, he could take laugh at himself. (At least in public.)

The publicity from the Twitter feed carried over into Sinker's book based on the saga, which showed that good writing can bridge platforms. Then there was our own Steven Pate, who broke down the "@MayorEmanuel" feed by the numbers:

• Number of followers at the moment he hung it up: 37,650
• Total number of tweets: 1,952
• Number of retweets for the account's all-time most-retweeted missive (Tuesday night's "If you have a giant fucking pile of money and a bunch of dumb fucks running against you, DREAMS DO COME TRUE."): 640
• Ratio of followers for MayorEmanuel's faketwitter to Rahm Emanuel's actual one: 3.3:1
• Amount of money the actual Rahm Emanuel offered to donate to charity if the proprietor of the fake account went public: $5,000
• Total occurrences of the word "fuck": 2968
• Total occurences of the second place word, "the": 1283
• Average f-bombs per tweet: 1.5
• Most uses of profanity in a single tweet: 27
• Number of hyphenated employments of the word "cock": 62
• Number of @ replies in the feed: 593
• Most @ replies received for any individual (Chicagoist weekend editor @SamAbernethy): 9
• Total number of people who received more than 3 replies: 7
• Number of tweets using Seesmic for Android (most of any method): 969
• Appearances of Axelrod's Civic: 44
• Number of tweets in his busiest month (Febuary): 506
• Claps of thunder above the Chicago skyline that appeared immediately after the final 7:40pm tweet: 1