Twitter Policy for Local Government and the Public Sector
The Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog produced a template twitter strategy for government departments a couple of weeks ago, so naturally I felt the need to have a look at it and see what they have to say, with a particular view to seeing what bits of the advice are relevant and/or important for other sites in the public sector, in particular councils and similar bodies.
How
It starts by setting out objectives and metrics for using twitter — what do you want to achieve, and how will you know whether or not you’ve achieved it. This is a key issue: while I’m firmly behind companies, organisations and the public sector expanding into the use of social media platforms, it’s important not just do to it “because it’s there”: you need to know what you want to be getting out of it.
The objectives it sets out are to extend the corporate reach online; to provide a human voice of the organisation, to provide thought leadership, to demonstrate commitment to digital channels, provide a low barrier method for feedback, to monitor mentions of the brand on twitter, and to provide live coverage of events for those who cannot attend.
Sensible objectives, and ones which can pretty much apply across the board in the public sector, irrespective of whether you’re central government, local government, or residing elsewhere in the public sector. They also describe how they will know whether they are achieving these things — from feedback, from the number of followers, and also from mentions elsewhere on blogs. So indeed I’m helping them achieve those targets by talking about it here…
They also list tools that people might like to use to help this — twitterfall for real time monitoring, twittersheep to help understand more about who is following you and qwitter to see why and when people have stopped following you.
The policy then goes on to look at the risks and how these can be managed: can you meet the demands of people who engage with you on twitter, does your use of twitter ‘fit’ (i.e. not too ‘corporate’) and so on. One good example is the accusation of being accused of bandwagon jumping and doing something of little actual benefit — if you have set out objectives which you are evaluating your use against, then it’s going to me much easier to justify what and why you are doing.
Similarly, they look at security risks — both of the account being compromised and how to reduce the possibility, and also the risk of inappropriate tweets: the loose tweets sink fleets! idea and again what sort of policies and procedures need to be in place for this.
Similarly they have looked at the resources required for this:
The Digital Media Team will be responsible for sourcing and publishing tweets, coordinating replies to incoming messages and monitoring the account. This activity is expected to take less than an hour a day. Evaluation will take longer: approximately one day every 3 monthsTemplate Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 5
So far, the policy is all very sound and sensible. It’s pretty much a common-sense approach that anyone who has used twitter with any degree of regularity would be happy to recommend. They also demonstrate an understanding of what and how much you should tweet — you want to tweet sufficiently regularly that people want to follow you for information, but not so frequently that you’re flooding them with information they don’t want.
They recommend 2-10 tweets per day, excluding @replies and coverage of live events, which seems a very sensible level to be looking at, and they also understand that because twitter is seen as about sharing it isn’t simply a case of promoting your own message: if someone else says something which is relevant or worthwhile, you need to consider re-tweeting their message.
Consideration also needs to be given to how you will promote the twitter channel — when to include links to it, when to mention it and so on.
What
Then they look at what content should be placed on twitter. This is a key question and one where you would need to determine what is suitable for your own audiences — but for example unless there is a good reason not to, any press releases to the web would be tweeted about, as well as blog posts, key website updates, marketing and so on.
They also consider whether there is a need to add content with additional value — this is where twitter comes into it’s own as a ‘breaking news’ medium (with more traditional media, posts, or other blogs providing more analysis later) although obviously you have to run this through an appropriateness filter — which is why you don’t want to be in a position where it will take hours to get clearance to publish a particular tweet.
They look at the use of hashtags — when is it appropriate to use a hashtag? I’ll have to disagree with the guidance here: they say it’s appropriate for providing live coverage of events and for crisis communications. I think this is missing the point slightly: if a particular event or topic is being widely talked about with a particular hashtag and you do not use that hashtag, there is a significant chance that your communications will be ignored because they will not be picked up by people filtering for that hashtag. I think it’s important here to consider that you may need to use the same hashtag as other people when talking about something which already has a specific hashtag.
Obviously for anything governmental you have specific issues around elections, particularly during that period known as Purdah (the time between the announcement of an election and it being held, when any government activities which may be seen as promoting a particular candidate are suspended):
The same approach will be taken to Twitter as other comms channels during recess and Purdah. We let our followers know the reason for reduced volume of content with a tweet to announce the start and end date.Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 9
Summary
And that is basically it. It’s all common sense guidelines that I agree with (although I’d maybe change the hashtag advice slightly), and it’s all stuff that regular users of twitter (particularly if they have been monitoring how it has been used by people representing organisations as well as individuals) will already have a fair idea of. The guidelines will probably most benefit those people who are less sure about twitter, particularly as the appendices provide information on what twitter is, how you use it, who else is using it, and a policy which includes two different options on following:
If you follow us on Twitter we will follow you back. This is automated. Being followed by us does not imply endorsement of any kind.
[Alternative, suggested by @scrumph (Sebastian Crump at COI)] If you follow @COIgovuk we will not automatically follow you back. This is to discourage the use of direct messaging, avoid resource wasting spam handling and so that you can easily identify other key Twitter users that we think are relevant to our industry and government in who we follow. However, being followed by COI does not imply endorsement of any kind.
Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 19
It’s obviously up to each government department how they want to manage followers, but I would strongly recommend that people consider the @scrumph approach (disclaimer: I know him). This is for three reasons: firstly because spammers will follow you, and if you follow them back it will< be seen as an endorsement of that account by some (irrespective of what disclaimers you publish to the contrary), secondly because if you do not follows spammers back it makes it easier for other people (and twitter itself) to identify these accounts as spammers and ban them, and thirdly because it means that the people you do follow people will know have been specifically chosen and are likely to have something useful do say (even if you do not agree with it or endorse it).
I would also urge that these guidelines be changed to recommend the @scrumph approach…
But other than those two minor things, these guidelines can be adopted pretty much as is by anyone else in the public sector considering how — and whether — they should start twittering.
Seb Crump says:
August 8th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Thanks for that. There are some distinct disadvantages of my approach though, e.g. some twitter ‘assessment’ tools do use the balance of follwers and following as a KPI measure for their scoring. Cue bad ‘press’ (probably from those that don’t really understand twitter) about gov accounts being elitist etc.
However, I think if it’s clearly explained in the public twitter policy then it should be OK.
In addition to the spam issue the other philosophical point of not auto-following is that – despite some people’s version of ‘twitterquette’ – twitter was designed for asynchronous following, unlike facebook for example (until the pages/fan functionality came along).
I still think that gov accounts should have the disclaimer no endorsement implied (even if, as you say, it won’t be believed – and in fact probably is); the main reason to only follow say those in your industry and sector and probably your staff is that there is the key secondary benefit of actually being able to use twitter effectively to monitor just those users. To auto-follow back would loose that benefit as the signal:noise ratio would become so low as to be ineffective for that.
Anyway thanks again – that was a blog post I was wanting to write, but as I don’t have a blog of my own (partly principle, partly #lazyweb
I’ve hijacked yours again 
Neil WIlliams says:
August 8th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Hi Jack
Really grateful you covered the Twitter strategy here in so much detail. I’m working my way through all the feedback over the next few weeks, and yours (and Seb’s) aren’t the only voices questioning the auto-follow approach.
I’m coming around to your way of thinking – but at the end of the day it’s for each organisation to choose what works for them. Some simply can’t staff up to following back manually – it can be a real drain on time to vet followers and follow the good ones back.
Seb Crump says:
August 11th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
To refine my earlier comments after talking to another colleague – I guess it mainly comes down to what the purpose of using Twitter as a channel is. This will vary from account to account, not organisation to organisation.
If the purpose is to engage with the public directly, then some sort of auto-follow may be appropriate (but I think some filtering needs to be applied to weed out spammers – that may require a script or 3rd party service). However, any accounts that are sector/audience specific I think there is justification to be picky who the account follows. Either way the resources required should not be great.
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ThePickards » Twitter Policy for Local Government and the Public Sector…