Neil Williams has a nice post about the way he has built up his network using Twitter:
Twitter, the micro-blogging site to rule them all, has introduced me to more relevant contacts more quickly than any other web 2.0 tool. Or other human being for that matter.
Some people just don’t like Twitter, and that’s fair enough, although I think that much of the time it’s more that they don’t like the way some people use it. One example of terrific use of it, though, comes from local government, of all places.
Quite a few local authorities have Twitter feeds now, as an extra channel of communication between the council and the folk who live in the area. OK, so there are unlikely to be that many Twitter users in each authority’s locality, but as an add-on bit of comms stuff, it’s pretty cool.
However, quite a few of the web teams behind these feeds have set up extra ones, which represent just the webbies themselves. So, not a feed with information about council, but actualy with news of what the web guys are doing and which they use to talk ides through with others. These feeds are seeing a considerable amount of activity and are increasing the interactions between these teams to an extent which I really don’t think happened before.
What’s even better though is the fact that others are being drawn into these conversations as well – it being Twitter, this is no walled garden. So when one local gov web team asks what people think about some of the stuff they are doing, they get responses from not just other local authority folk but also feedback from people like me, who might have a different perspective on things.
It’s a great example of the use that these social networks can bring, as long as you approach them in an open, and collaborative way, of course.
The local gov web team twitter feeds are:
- http://twitter.com/sdcwebteam
- http://twitter.com/shcinternetteam
- http://twitter.com/SBCDevTeam
Have I missed any?
Glad you’re trumpeting this stuff, Dave. It needs trumpeting!
These tweeting webbies, plus the Parliament guys, seems to be a bit of an emerging trend. Do you think it’s a case of leading by example: web teams building their own case studies by conducting themselves more openly and showing the rest of the organisation how doing so enriches customer relations? (And that it’s not so dangerous after all).