Tweeting in the public sector

I know the world  (and this blog) probably doesn’t need another article about Twitter, but in the wake of the Working Together white paper, I found myself mulling the part that Twitter can play in improving public services and thought I’d share it here as the start of a conversation.

Of all the things that people use Twitter for, three stand out for me as really valuable tools to help build more effective public services:

Distribute real time information. Twitter excels at this as shown by two of my favourite examples: http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow/ crowd-sources reports from Tweeters to provide a live snow-map of the UK, whilst Tubinator helps Londoners mind the gap more effectively. It’s cheaper than SMS and faster than RSS, so shouldn’t we be seeing widespread use of Twitter as a channel for real time updates on the weather, food safety alerts, air quality, flooding and so on? And what about queue lengths in post offices; drop in health centres, and on the phone to government agencies?

Winning the battle for attention. Much has been written about No 10’s use of twitter to do everything from announcing major policy to commenting on the weather in airports. I would argue that the success of the Number 10 feed (which at more than 207,000 followers is, at the time of writing, the 22nd most popular feed in the world) is bringing a level of immediacy, intimacy and accessibility to the Prime Minister’s activities. It’s hard to imagine another medium that could get No 10 this amount of focused attention. No 10 starts with a unique advantage, but that doesn’t mean Twitter can’t be a really powerful way for ministers and departments to build a more personal relationship with the people and the groups they serve, including influential intermediaries such as journalists.

Finding out what’s happening. People forget that Twitter has a powerful search engine. Since Twitter is a real time outpouring of thoughts, connections and opinion, Twitter search provides a real time guide to what people are thinking right now on any issue. And lets not forget that Twitter does one to one communication too. Politicians, policy teams and departments can be taking the temperature of public opinion to make sure they respond directly to hot issues or spot those about to be come newsworthy. Despite all this potential, Tweetminster shows how few of our elected representatives have yet to cotton on.

Like lasers, you get the feeling that Twitter is a solution for which only some of the problems have been found. I would welcome comments suggesting other ways for the public sector to get the most from Twitter.