Al Smith Social media in local government

More twittering

Following on from my earlier post, now seems a good point to review progress and lessons learnt.

At UKGovCamp09 I went to a session run by @neilfranklin, @jennybee, @neillyneil and @jamzam. It was a very useful session, and the main things I took from it were to use a personal voice and to follow people back.

The thinking behind following people back was something that hadn't really occurred to me before. I thought it was a bit creepy to be followed by a public body - this was reinforced by my own feelings when West Midlands Police started following me back on Twitter. This aside I had a 'slap-myself-on-the-forehead' moment when I realised how this can look:

MODEL A
1) Interested citizen starts following public body because they're interested in what the public body wants to say.
2) Public body broadcasts messages to their followers.

MODEL B
1) Interested citizen wants to have a conversation with public body so starts following them.
2) To indicate that they are willing to listen and take part in the conversation, the public body follows them back (out of courtesy).

We've moved towards Model B now.

To hear what people are saying I use Google Reader. This takes RSS feeds from Twitter Search - I've subscribed to searches for @NewcastleCC, as well as searches related to Newcastle City Council.

We're using Tweetburner to broadcast our RSS News, Events and Jobs so that the channel has a steady stream of content. I would like to alter this so that headlines of news stories are amended from those on the press releases before being posted on Twitter, but I'm not sure how to do that yet. We're adding in unique content so that it's not just RSS feeds and we're responding to comments.

We're also using Tweet Later to manage auto-adds and to send a welcome DM to followers. Our message currently reads: "Thanks for following Newcastle City Council, if you have any feedback on our use of Twitter please let us know". One piece of feedback we received from this was from @Documentally who advised that this can seem impersonal and can cause people to unfollow. I'm still undecided on this. I'd like to let people know we're listening and that we're still learning, but I don't want people to think that we're actually just going through the motions in an impersonal manner.

One reason behind using Tweet Later was that we are getting large numbers of new followers and it's becoming difficult to manage. We currently have 253 followers (as at 10:22 GMT, 18/02/09). We've been actively growing our number of followers while trying to target users who are local to us. To do this we've identified 'tastemakers' who are active in social media and have a connection to Newcastle and the North East. We've used Twitter Grader for this. A result of this has been that people will start a conversation about us using Twitter as a sort of 'novelty', this in turn will allow others to discover us on Twitter. At present 17% of our followers list their location as Newcastle and a further 4% are from the wider North East. Together they make up the largest section of followers.

We have had one negative response from someone who we chose to follow in an unsolicited manner which said: "Well what do you know @NewcastleCC is following me. I find this very odd." We've tried to chose people who are using Twitter for business purposes so that they do not feel that the council is snooping on them and have apologised to the person who voiced concerns.

We've also had a fair amount of coverage for our use of Twitter. Both associated with our coverage of the Fenham by-election and school closures.

The next step is to provide more unique content through Twitter and to develop more of a voice for the channel. It would also be interesting to use Twitter to generate content - in a similar manner to @FenlandCouncil: "When we get a few more local followers we'll try and produce a weekly newspaper section entirely through Twitter - what do you think?"

I'd also like to use more TwitPics - I've tried this out through my own Twitter account and will be doing more on this in the coming weeks.