Twitter Use By Government

A discussion group of American government webmasters (mostly from local governments) have recently focused on Twitter.  Here are some of the more interesting observations:

So, we had our first interesting Twitter situation today. Somebody signed up to follow our Twitter feed, and they replied to one of our news articles regarding speed patrols, commenting that there is speeding in her neighborhood. We have @replies turned off from showing up in our feed, but they're viewable on our portal page.  In this particular situation, the person had a Web site where I could find the email address, then dropped the question into our Request Partners CRM system. Somebody will then get back to this person. I hit reply to the question in Twitter to let them know we had passed on the inquiry. Found out that shows up in your public twitter feed, and that instead you can go to a person's twitter page and click on "message" to send a direct message that, assumedly, doesn't show up in a feed.   Pretty interesting that on day two it turns out there's a customer service usage for this. Obviously we're going to have to think up procedures to deal with this sort of thing. Do we need to be always logged in to Twitter to monitor if these sort of things come in? What sort of response time is expected? Do we reply in Twitter or via our CRM: in many cases, I probably won't be able to track down an email address to put in the CRM. 

 

... a concept called "ambient awareness."  Ambient awareness tells us that yes, individual little updates about soup or shoes make little sense to many people by themselves, but on Twitter and Facebook, all of the updates over time paint a picture of someone's life, their mood, their experiences, etc.  ...  This argument can easily be adapted for governments/organizations/businesses. Take the American Red Cross and its Twitter page:  http://twitter.com/redcross.  The Red Cross uses Twitter for a variety of communication purposes including sharing key links, preparedness facts, disaster recovery information, photos and seasonal tips. The "ambient awareness" gives followers a sense of connection with the Red Cross, which in turn leads to a more general awareness about the Red Cross' mission, purpose and business functions (and, perhaps, leads to donations).  Twitter's not for everyone, but neither are our government Web sites for everyone. It's simply taking existing content, business purposes, mission, etc., and using a new channel. The same arguments being proffered about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., were delivered about computers and E-mail -- are they really worth it or are they just geewiz, fancy, trendy things? [Greg Licamele, Fairfax County, Virginia]

 

You might be surprised, though, regarding age [that older people don't understand Twitter]. As I was searching around for Napervillians who Tweet, I found my old high school biology teacher. He has apparently become a tech guru and consults a lot. Never woulda thunk it when you saw him digging for water tables in my environmental resources class or showing us how to dice up a pig fetus in anatomy. Heck, he's got 1300 followers on Twitter. Blew my mind.  [Kevin Apgar, City of Naperville, Illinois]

 

Ironically, we were on the phone with our notification system vendor (located in LA) when an earthquake hit - and the mainstream media was "scooped" by Twitter in that case. Just think of how long it takes to tweet "Earthquake - LA!" vs. having to publish that info on a website. It makes complete sense to me in the disaster context (e.g., shelter in place instructions), to publish public health alerts, transit delays, road hazards... basically highly time-sensitive info. On election night, we had twitter up on one of our videoconferencing screens (side by side with our portal, CNN and Comedy Central), and it was truly amazing to see how it captured the global excitement of the event. ... I do see the value of being able to connect with constituents without requiring them to come to our portal, and twitter is one such channel. 

 

You could have posted 4 tweets in the time it took you to write this one graph!  It takes the same amount, if not less, time.

 

What got me was noticing a sign in my local coffee shop's window with the shop's Twitter address on it. I went to look it up and found that it had a BUNCH of local folks following it on Twitter. I then went through and followed each and every one of those people with the library's account and the vast majority followed me back. That's how I became convinced that there was some value to the incredibly minimal effort required to tweet.  We feed in our blog posts automatically, so that took a minute to set up and then we don't have to worry about it again. 

 

Am I the only one who gardens anymore? Sad state of affairs I think.