I first heard about Twitter through a friend of my wife several months ago and thought it was stupid. I’m a technically savvy guy, but I just didn’t see the need to post my every move for all of my “followers” to see and I really don’t care to get an update each time one of my friends gets a great cup of coffee or takes a cute picture of one of their kids.
But then I started to see a lot of articles floating around about how government agencies were using Twitter to keep citizens informed. Now that’s something I can relate to. The citizens may not care about where we get our coffee, but they certainly do want to be kept informed about what is going on in their community and about what we’re doing to keep them safe. After researching several popular vendors of mass communications products for government, I know that these are very expensive tools, so the fact that Twitter is a free service makes the deal even sweeter.
Long story short? My agency has added Twitter to its toolbox as of yesterday and we look forward to using it to get our message out to the people we serve.
Check us out: www.twitter.com/TyronePolice.
U.S. Embassy London has one for reaching out to the American ex-pat community here in the UK. It’s great. Our following is growing steadily.
http://www.twitter.com/usembassylondon
Great to hear. Sure, there is a lot of nonsense on Twitter, but there is a lot of nonsense everywhere. It actually has the potential to be a valuable channel, and I look forward to a follow-up post on how it works out!