Twittering

#testittuesday – public service use of twitter par excellence

I had a great day yesterday (Wednesday) at the FirePro seminar on social media use in Fire and Rescue Services.

I have a load of notes to type up and share here, but one thing really jumped out at me during the day – the #testittuesday campaign.

Basically, it’s a simple public safety campaign to get people to test their smoke alarms every week, on a Tuesday. The hashtag is used, and folk are encouraged to retweet it to get more coverage.

It was started by Elle from Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service, who gave an entertaining and informative presentation to the group about how it all came about. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a vast amount of planning – it just seemed like a good idea and Elle just got on with it.

Here’s why I think this is a great campaign, and an almost perfect use of Twitter as a public service campaign:

  • It’s completely within the existing culture of Twitter – all about the hashtag and the social nature of the message – it’s all about people passing it on
  • It’s simple – just a quick reminder to people to perform one straightforward action
  • Very low barriers to entry – no need to sign up for anything you aren’t already a member of. If you’re on twitter you see the message, and with one click you forward it on to your friends
  • It’s uncontroversial – nobody is going to take umbrage at being reminded to do something that’s easy to forget, and yet potentially life saving
  • It’s not about the fire service’s own twitter account – this isn’t some bid to get more followers. It’s about getting the message out to as many people as possible
  • It takes advantage of the trust people have in their networks. If a fire service asks me on twitter to check my fire alarm, I might do it – but I’m more likely to if some of my friends do so

I think there’s lots to learn here for all public services wanting to make the most of social media channels. Always consider the medium you are using, and what sort of behaviour works well. Don’t ask too much of people, keep it simple and straightforward. Above all, don’t make it about you or your organisation, but about the message you want to get out.

Almost live transparency from Greater Manchester Police

GMP

A really interesting experiment is happening in Manchester today, thanks to the local police force.

Greater Manchester Police are, according to their website,

publishing details of every incident that it deals with on Twitter to allow the public to see what officers at one of the largest UK forces face on a daily basis.

This video explains more:

You can follow all the action on the GMP website, where they are aggregating together the outputs from three different Twitter streams, or just get the latest from @gmpolice.

As I said, interesting stuff, and a great use of the scale that social media tools like Twitter offer in terms of quickly publishing a lot of information. Imagine doing something like this through traditional web publishing tools!

It’s also a great example of a public service using transparency proactively and positively. It doesn’t always have to be bad news.

Google goes for Twitter

Google Buzz is the search engine giant’s latest attempt to get social to work within its suite of applications. Strangely, while we use Google’s stuff for all sorts of things, from searching to email to RSS aggregation to document editing, we don’t tend to use their services much for sharing. Instead, we go to Twitter, or maybe Facebook.

Perhaps all that will now change.

Here’s a video explaining Buzz and how it will work:

It may seem crazy to attempt to take Twitter on in its own territory, but Google have a couple of real strengths which mean they end up winning the status update battle.

For a start, Google have been quietly building up a range of services based on your Google account. You may have started this account to access Gmail, or maybe Google Reader.

But did you know you also have a public profile on Google, which you can fill up with all sorts of information about you and the sites and services you use? Here’s mine.

Or how about the way Google has a really cool service that manages all of your contacts?

What about the social circle search, which lets you look for content created by your friends, or friends of friends?

In some ways it’s kinda scary the way Google collects all this information, and the way it puts it all together like this. But it’s also a reason why Buzz might succeed where all other Twitter-killers have failed.

What’s one of the things that puts people off Twitter the first time they use it? The fact that you don’t know anyone, and have nobody to talk to. But the way Buzz will tap into your existing networks, you might not have that problem on Google’s service. The user base already exists, and it is already massive.

There is also masses of potential for organisations using Google Apps, where having Buzz as part of the mix will bring masses of value, and possibly kill off Yammer in the process.

There’s another reason why Buzz might well beat Twitter, and that is the money thing. Google has a business model, and a very successful one. It isn’t hard seeing how Buzz can slot into that model, and make a contribution. At some point, though, Twitter is going to have to start earning money. How it does that, and whether it manages to do so without annoying the hell out of its users – for whom revenue generation will necessitate a change – will determine whether Twitter survives.

Another thing that is in Buzz’s favour is that it sits inside Gmail. In your inbox. Despite the massive growth in social networking over the last few years, email is still the internet’s killer app, and most people spend a hell of a lot of time looking at their inboxes.

As an example of this, I use Google Talk a lot as an instant messaging service, but I use it entirely from within Gmail. I usually can’t be faffed loading up a separate client for IM, but if someone’s name pops up in Gmail saying they’re online, I’ll often grab them for a quick chat.

Having a status update, Twitter-like facility sat there too means that I’m going to use it, to the point where I might stop visiting other locations to do similar stuff. Bye, bye Twitter, maybe.

Of course lots of similar stuff was said about Wave, and while that wasn’t exactly a dud, it did strike me as a solution looking for a problem. A great bit of technology that felt a bit like a square peg. Buzz, though, isn’t looking to revolutionise the way we use the web, just to make an existing activity easier, and nearer – and that might be enough to make it work.

Having written all this, I of course don’t have access to Buzz yet. If you are one of the lucky ones, do please tell us all about it in the comments.

Update: Not sure how I missed it, but there is an API for Buzz, allowing for developers to hook it up to all sorts of other services, whether “Atom, AtomPub, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, MediaRSS, Salmon, the Social Graph API, PortableContacts, WebFinger, and much, much more” according to the Google Social Web blog.

Elsewhere:

Moronic reporting of non issues

Take a look at this story, excitingly titled on the BBC News site “Council Twitter users face rebuke“.

Councillors in Cornwall could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee for using social networking sites.

The trouble is, no they’re not.

Later in the article:

It follows claims that a number of councillors used Twitter during a meeting and mocked other members.

If a councillor is found to breach the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, they could be suspended.

So this is about councillors saying naughty things, and not about them using Twitter, or whatever.

Another example of the easy fixation on technology as being the story, when it isn’t. The story is behaviour: people and the relationships they have with others.

We really don’t need anymore Twitter scare stories, it isn’t productive and it helps nobody.

Tweetwally

tweetwally is a terrifically simple site that lets you create your own pages that track what is being said on Twitter.

It’s a great way of sharing tweets on a topic with people who perhaps aren’t hardcore Twitter users.

I have set one up that tracks any tweets that have localgov in them. If anybody in local government wanted to demonstrate the use of Twitter in having conversations about local gov, they just need to load up the page, without having to mess about with searches, or lists, or whatever. It’s at http://localgov.tweetwally.com/.

Great work by Clockwork to produce a nice little site.

Hat tip to Matt Jukes for pointing it out.

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