With all the hype about Twitter I thought I’d check on what federal government departments and agencies are actually doing with it. My first stop, as always, was the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki set up by Mike Kujawski of the Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Marketing.
It lists a handful of departments and agencies on Twitter including the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS).
A quick look at the Centre’s Twitter homepage indicates they’ve started off on the right foot. Their Tweets are aimed at providing value to their target audience – not just blasting out their own messages.
They tweet about things like free Webinar’s they’re offering of interest to their audience and, most importantly, they retweet things of interest from other organisations. The retweets are the real value because, by doing so, they’re playing a role that grows in importance everyday as the volume of information swells on the net: that of curator. Curators provide great value to their target audience by doing two key things:
1) understanding their target audience’s needs
2) sifting through the mass of information to find things relevant to their audience and sharing it.
Curation takes times and resources and that’s why it’s valuable.
It will be interesting to scale the Centre’s Twitter success over the next few months by one of the key measures: retweets of their stuff.
