Twitter police stop traffic

Please accept my application to join your campaign against social media snarkiness.

I’ve been on the receiving end of such snarking myself. But reading back over my piece on the CLG Twitter launch, I really don’t think it was ’snarky’. I actually applauded the experimentation, but pointed out some specific problems with the approach, to try and help it ‘get off on the right footing’.

I think the ‘good to try, good to fail’ theory holds up only so far. The web gives us infinite visibility of previous failures. We should be learning from others’ failures before we even think of making our own. Doubly so for ‘Government’ which – rightly or wrongly – is seen as a single entity, as opposed to 20-odd independent departments.

There are enough examples of good and bad practice out there. And as you say yourself, there are enough good people who would happily share their experiences for barely the price of a cup of coffee.

[...] Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard [...]

Interesting that my initial tweet, which wasn’t applauding @transportgovuk’s limited engagement via twitter, was seen as being ’snarky’, the 140 character limit doesn’t allow for much depth to be explored via a tweet but I stand by my initial observation.

I think allowing a little ’slack’ for large organisations venturing in to the wonderful world of twitter can be a little counter productive.

Speaking for myself, and I am by no means a seasoned twitter user, I initially followed some council websites on twitter but pretty soon found myself unfollowing them because they didn’t engage in conversations, they weren’t even tweets by a human being, they were simply an RSS feed of events, or new articles, being published via twitter.

If the twitter community’s experience of a twitter user is that they’re not engaging in a conversation, that they’re obly broadcasting – and especially when the broadcast can be received in other ways, via RSS or email subscriptions – then I suspect I’m not alone in hitting the unfollow button.

In my, perhaps not so humble opinion, @transportgovuk might as well have registered as @noreply and that certainly isn’t in the spirit. If they truly aren’t interested in engaging in conversations then perhaps they’d be better advised to avoid twitter until such time as they’re prepared to listen as well as broadcast.

@simond – you’re quite right of course, not that snarky at al on second read. And though it felt like criticism at the time it did, in fact, make CLG’s tweeting better as the team took the feedback about confusing voice on board.

@theimp67 – it’s certainly true that some don’t get better even when you *do* cut them some slack, like the councils you referred to – and maybe DFT will turn out no better. I just rather suspect that the people venturing forth onto Twitter totally get it, but are hamstrung by senior management. There is, perhaps, something in the idea that public criticism over such things could actually help the webbies persuade reluctant bosses around to trusting their better understanding of the medium, as much as it could hinder them.

But my campaign against social media snarkiness still stands (even if it’s just me and Stephen!)

[...] And finally… the Department for Transport makes its debut on Twitter, alas its bio states: ‘Please direct queries via the ‘Contact us’ section of the website’.  Oh well… (via Neil Williams) [...]

[...] there is to say – and quite how worth saying it is, especially now the platform is more mature and less forgiving of mistakes. So in case it's of use to others who are thinking of doing the same, I've turned BIS's Twitter [...]

[...] But, having held back my JFDI inclinations long enough to sit down and write a proper plan for BIS’s corporate Twitter account, I was surprised by just how much there is to say – and quite how worth saying it is, especially now the platform is more mature and less forgiving of mistakes. [...]

[...] Neil (Twitter ID: @neillyneil) sees the irony and justifies it on the Cabinet Office’s Digital Engagement blog with: “I was surprised by just how much there is to say – and quite how worth saying it is, especially now the platform is more mature and less forgiving of mistakes.” [...]

What can I do with Twitter?

You have to hand it to the government though, at least they attempted to use twitter to any effect. They, and anyother political or corporate organization, could simply ignore the platform entirely and that would be a #fail in itself.

[...] organizations had to work out their own ways to make use of such social media. Some snafus and snarky comments were inevitable, which might have slowed adoption for still others. Moreover, social media seems to [...]