Twitter as social media in practice: Training.gov.au
Sorry I’ve been a bit slack with posting and particular quality posts lately. Been busy with stress at work and sorting out a land purchase contract as you would well know if you follow me on Twitter, for I have been swearing about it non-stop for the past 3 months.
Anyway over the weekend I had the idea of complementing our existing government project blog for Training.gov.au with a Twitter feed, which is @TrainingGovAu. Ok I realise I should have put a bit more thought into it before setting it up and perhaps expanding our communication strategy to incorporate that - I will do so retrospectively, but didn’t think it particularly necessary as I know what I’m doing.
But it was premature in that we don’t currently have the capacity to support it yet - however next week we’ll have a full-time stakeholder engagement officer on the project team who will be assisting us with communication including the project blog and the Twitter account.
If you’re going to have a Twitter account as a social media channel you should post to it more often than I currently am for the Training.gov.au account. I’d say around half a dozen times a day would be a reasonable measure. Too little and there’s no value in the content and it doesn’t fit in with the way Twitter works with it’s constant flow and stream of linear tweets. It’ll get lost in the fray. Too many updates and it’ll be regarded as spamming.
But the number of followers, type of content and interaction would all be factors in considering how often to post and the ratio of original messages to replies. Whether you’re going to use the direct message feature or integrate with other channels and be linking off to other sites.
My plan for the Training.gov.au feed is to provide a granular level of information to expand on the blog and other communication channels so interested persons can get a real feel for the velocity and size of the project and to make it more personal, even more so than the blog currently does. Let everyone out there know there’s real people behind all this, just trying to get the job done and dealing with issues and stress.
I think there’s often a perception that governments can spend millions on IT projects with so little to show for it. I want to use this feed to show that the money is irrelevant in terms of making anything work more smoothly or faster. I want to reveal just a bit of the complexity and process behind projects such as this with the hope that people will be understanding and tolerant once they understand that we’re not lazy and just taking our sweet time. We work our arses off. I felt bad leaving work at 6pm today and half the team was there still working.
Plus the microblogging format of Twitter allows me to post information that doesn’t qualify for a whole blog post and facilitates conversation without requiring people to post comments in the context of a blog post.
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