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Co-incidental to my post about Twitter on Friday, in the UK the TweetMinister site has launched as a central way to track UK Members of Parliament using Twitter.
It's a very slick looking site, developed as a public service initiative by private organisations, designed to allow members of the public to view what MPs are saying on Twitter.
Currently it lists seven MPs, from all sides of UK politics, together with party Twitter streams for Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
It has received some attention in the UK already, with a mention in the House of Lords, which itself operates a blog site, Lords of the Blog.
TweetMinister has its own Twitter account (naturally), where the creators discuss the design and next steps for the site.
It wouldn't be hard for an organisation to set up a similar site in Australia - though it might still find it difficult to find many Australian MP Twitterers to follow. Perhaps a blog-based site would be more successful here to start with.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
TweetMinister launches in UK as central way to communicate with MPs | Tweet |
Friday, January 02, 2009
Twitter successes - case studies for government use | Tweet |
As the government is generally a monopoly provider of services it can at times seem less important to monitor customer sentiment on an ongoing basis or address customer service deficits...until an MP writes a letter to a Minister, traditional media picks up an issue, or the next election comes around.
Personally I see enormous advantage in monitoring public sentiment towards specific agencies and departments - particularly online sentiment (where journalists often get their stories).
This allows departments greater early warning of issues, with the ability to address them more quickly. It also provides a baseline of public perceptions that senior public servants can use when a Minister receives details of a specific incident, which might be able to be correctly positioned a complaint as isolated or used to support the case for wider reforms that an agency has already identified as necessary.
I've posted previously about the range of US government agencies and elected officials using Twitter, the most popular web-based 'micro-blogging' service, in various initiatives ranging from disaster recovery, through traffic management, policy development, customer service and monitoring public sentiment. You'll find my post at Twitter catching on in the public sector and List of US government Twitter users.
An upcoming book by Shel Israel will be recounting stories of how organisations have used Twitter to navigate public relations issues and deliver positive customer service experiences. It will also contain some of the examples where organisations ignored online conversations and lost business and public reputation.
Shel has begun publishing notes about some of the case studies he'll be using in his book in his blog, Global Neighbours. These include,
- U-Haul - where a single bad experience has echoed to more than 10,000 people and taken up in broader media,
- Zappo - a US-based online retailer founded in 1999, now selling more than US$1 billion per year, which uses Twitter as a tool to carry the corporate culture beyond the organisation's walls to establish credibility with customers,
- HR Block - who uses Twitter to build bridges with Gen X and Y clients just entering the tax paying arena, in order to lock them in as customers for life, and
- Ford - who used Twitter to minimise a major reputation issue which could have created national media headlines - but only because they had built online credibility over time prior to the issue.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Selecting the right online tools for community consultation | Tweet |
The International Association for Public Participation has developed a Community Engagement Spectrum (PDF) to assist public servants in selecting the right approaches to use in different forms of public engagement.
The Online Community Consultation blog has built on this, with a post, Which Online Tools are Right for your Project? detailing a chart of some of the online tools that can be used for different forms of community engagement.
While the post is slanted towards the features in 'Bang the table' it's still a useful guide as to which online tools are best used for particular engagement needs.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
What would occur if the STOP sign was invented today? | Tweet |
Public Sector Marketing 2.0 has published an online video looking at the process government would go through if it was first inventing a STOP sign for traffic intersections.
While cynical, perhaps there's a few grains of truth in the message that sometimes in government we focus on our own importance and processes to the expense of the customer and outcomes. What do you think?
What would happen if the STOP sign was invented in 2008?
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Involved in eProcurement? European eprocurement forum looking to build international ties | Tweet |
The European eProcurement forum (an initiative supported by the European Commission) is seeking to build international ties to improve its understanding and build collective knowledge about what is occuring in the eprocurement field, what works and what doesn't work in different jurisdictions around the world.
If you're involved or interested in eprocurement, check them out at the eProcurement Forum community.
Also of interest is the new eProcurement Map released by the forum, which is a map of activities having an impact on the development of European interoperable eProcurement solutions.
