the What of twitter

You’ve had a think on WHY you’re Twittering, so WHAT are you going to say?  Tweets can be formal or informal.  Remember that they’re always public (unless you use the “Direct Message” function), and if you want to maintain a professional brand (personal or organisational) then your content should reflect that.  Meaningful.  Useful.  Funny.  It’ll all depend on WHY you’re doing it, Twitter provides a platform to connect with an audience… create the opportunity and the content you publish could be any message your organisation wants to convey, or engage with the community, and ultimately build relationships with the community.  (“Community” is a touchy-feely social media word for whoever your audience / customers / clients / stakeholders might be).

Here’s some guiding principles for Twitter “content”, known as “Tweets”:

authentic, timely, relevant, consistent

Time for some real-life examples:

Listening

Ok, so it’s hard to provide examples of organisations using Twitter to “Listen” and monitor what’s being said about theim or key topics/trends that are dear to their hearts.  Trust me when I say that most communications professionals in NZ organisations are listening to Twitter and other social media platforms.  If they’re not, they should hurry up and do so.  There are wiser people than I who can advise on tools to “listen” or monitor who’s Tweeting what about you, and some great applications to help you do so… which I’ll save for another post.

Inland Revenue have done some interesting e-govt consultations, but not via Twitter.  I betcha they’re “listening” to Twitter though. In July, they ran this one but for the most part, IRD’s RSS feeds are a “broadcast” approach to online communications.  That said, their website and 0800 phoneline provide good service, and I’m sure they’re considering their communications channels very carefully.  After all, how many people want to have public conversations about tax?? (well, maybe there are a few…)

Broadcasting

Ok, now we’ve got HEAPS of examples to show What organisations are Tweeting in a “Broadcasting” way.  Here’s a couple that I follow to keep up to date with what’s going on:

and:

Broadcasting via Twitter is great.  The key thing is to keep it consistent: if you’re broadcasting “news” or pushing information out, be clear that that’s what you’re doing.  “@NZTEnews” does exactly what it says, pushes out news and links to the source which is usually a NZTE website.  If your communications policy can be pushed a bit further, it might be good to set up another Twitter account for engagement, if you want to use Twitter to connect and converse and build community.

Here’s some ideas about how that can work:

Engaging

Here is a great blog post for NZ public sector agencies keen to engage via twitter (and big thanks to Julian Carver for the link).  Using Twitter (with #hashtags) for live engagement has worked really well for agencies like the Department of Conservation and MoRST, especially around events that were designed to collect and share information.

During a real life event, Twitter is a great platform for expanding conversations for people who are not able to attend, and for those in the audience to have a voice during and around the presentations.  Some events that I’ve attended (ok, mostly super-geeky ones) have had a big screen with live twitter-feeds on display during presentations.  You can see a single user broadcasting updates on the #edmnz topic here, and see how the conversations are going around the topics of #nzdata.

The key to success is to plan for it, have a facilitator who understands it, and decide how much profile you want the Twitter engagement to have before, during and after your event/issue.

Building

One step up from engaging on a topic and leading/facilitating Twitter conversations using #hashtags, is actually engaging with other Twitter users.  Some NZ government agencies are doing this, but they are in the minority.  Some great examples I found of public organisations using Twitter to build community are:

1. the National Library: @NLNZ

These crazy civil servants have a great tradition of #tbreaktweets – as far as I can tell they schedule a time for Twitter, and use it as a hybrid “Broadcast” tool (check out some cool stuff from our collection) and a community builder, whereby they respond to comments and conversations that grow around their posts.  Very cool (thanks @auchmill for the tip!)

and from the Ministry for Economic Development, most notably the Companies Office, who I talked about yesterday.  One other thing to note is that the Companies Office have a couple of individuals with personal twitter accounts.  This “split personality” is a tricky one for organisations (and employees) to handle.  But I think they do a most excellent job!

These are just some of the examples I came across – there are probably more out there!  Keen to hear from anyone who has some more examples of what works well for NZ organisations, in the context of Why they’re using Twitter and What they’re Tweeting.

Some more ideas on “What” to Tweet can be found on Chris Brogan’s most excellent blog post “50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business“.  And by looking through any one of a gazillion social media blogs…

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