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Late last year the Australian and international media was full of stories about the demise of Twitter.
Articles talked about how the service's growth had slowed - perhaps even reversed - and that there were clear signs that people were tired and looking for the next big thing.
Six months later and Twitter has released some new figures on usage which demonstrate how the service has continued to grow. Reported in Read Write Web, in the post Just the Facts: Statistics from Twitter Chirp last April, Twitter had grown to over 105 million global users, with 300,000 signing up each day.
With 600,000 searches on Twitter daily, the service receives 3 billion requests each day.
The site received roughly 180 million unique visitors each month, with 60% of tweets coming from third-party applications and 37% of Twitter users using their phones to tweet.
Given that Twitter only had around 8 million unique website visitors in March 2009, the figures don't appear to indicate a service in decline.
Now that over 500 Australian journalists and news media people (or follow the Twitter list here) and more than 200 government bodies in Australia and 49 Federal politicians (plus an unknown number of state and local elected representatives) have Twitter accounts, any Agencies who have not yet learnt to tweet are beginning to look very 20th Century.
By the way if your department has Twitter accounts that aren't on my list, please add yourself via a comment or in the Google spreadsheet.
After all what good is a Twitter account that you don't tell anyone about!
Monday, June 21, 2010
Twitter's demise widely over-reported | Tweet |
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Australia's first political leaders' Twitter debate happening in NSW at 11.15am | Tweet |
According to the Sydney Morning Herald article, Twitter debate for NSW leaders Keneally, O'Farrell and Rhiannon, NSW's political leaders will stage Australia's first political leadership debate via Twitter this morning at 11.15am.
Featuring NSW Premier Kristina Keneally from the Labor party, Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell from the Liberal party and Greens party leader Lee Rhiannon and moderated by Channel 9's Kevin Wilde, the debate will be tagged under the hashtag #penrithdebate.
The leaders will be taking questions from the public using the same hashtag.
Note that you don't need to be a Twitter user to watch the debate, although to ask a question or comment you will need an account.
It will also be possible to simply follow the leaders and moderator via Tallyroom.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Victoria Police recruit tweeting and YouTubing their Academy training | Tweet |
In a move designed to improve awareness and understanding of the process by which officers are trained (and encourage more quality candidates), Victoria Police is supporting one of its new Academy recruits to tweet their way through training.
Announced in Victoria Police News as The Twittering recruit, Stephanie Attard begun her career as Victoria Police's first recruit tweeter on 7 June this year.
From the article,
Armed with an iPad, 21-year-old Stephanie from Gladstone Park, will ‘tweet’ every day between 7am and 5pm about her time at the Academy.Stephanie's Twitter account already has over 1,150 followers and she's actively and candidly responding to questions.
Stephanie’s Twitter account, http://twitter.com/vicpolrecruit, will be unedited, and all tweets will be straight from Stephanie’s own finger tips.
And it won’t be just the good experiences she will share on her micro-blog - Stephanie will tweet about her good days and her bad.
Videos of Stephanie's experiences are also being distributed via the VPBlue YouTube channel. Fortnightly videos are planned through the 23 week training process.
This type of approach can be an extremely valuable recruiting tool for any kind of organisation if allowed to be authentic and unscripted (as the Victoria Police effort appear to be).
Victoria Police are now widely using social media tools for community engagement and outreach, including their Twitter account, @VictoriaPolice (with a well constructed Twitter policy here).
They are also very active Facebook participants with both a main Victoria Police Page and a Recruiting forum and hold regular online chats on topics of community interest.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Gov 2.0 Heroes Day - 15 June | Tweet |
GovFresh celebrates Gov 2.0 Heroes Day every year on 15 June.
Gov 2.0 Heroes Day celebrates, in the words of GovFresh,
...citizens inside and outside government who go above and beyond the call of duty and creatively leverage technology to build a more open, transparent and collaborative democracy.
The 'usual suspects' of social media are being used to share information and support communications, including a Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube - which already features a range of video interviews.
There's also an interview with Luke Fretwell, founder of GovFresh, about the day.
Who would you consider a Gov 2.0 hero?
Friday, June 11, 2010
Reinventing website perfection | Tweet |
Traditionally, in my experience both in the private and public sector, the way to build a 'perfect' website has been considered to be;
invest a large quantity of resources, personnel and time at the start of the development process,
use this investment to build all the functionality that the developers can dream up, write all the content the communicators can think of and test it with audiences,
launch the 'perfect' website and hope it works, and then
replace the website (fixing most of the bits that failed) after 3-5 years by repeating the process again.
Personally I've never liked this approach. It places a lot of reliance on using past knowledge to guess future (organisational and audience) needs, involves investing a lot of resources upfront with limited ability to terminate or redirect projects until after they have failed and it also results in websites that degrade in effectiveness over time which can lead to progressively greater reputation and legal risks.
I'd like to see the process for developing a 'perfect' website reinvented. The new process must involve a low upfront cost, the ability to be flexible and agile to meet changing needs quickly and be capable of making a website more and more effective over time, improving reputation and reducing legal risks.
But how is it possible to achieve all these goals at once?
The answer is actually quite simple and well understood by successful entrepreneurs.
Rather than aiming for a perfect site on release day after an extended development period, the goal is to quickly build and launch a site that meets at least one critical audience need.
Once the site has been launched, ensure there are tools for monitoring how it is used and identifying user needs. Then progressively build extra functionality and write more content, guided primarily by the needs of your audience.
This approach ensures the site has enough value at launch to be successful, albeit in a more limited fashion than a 'kitchen sink' website (with more functionality at launch). It also ensures that the website grows progressively more useful and relevant to the audience you aim to serve.
In this way the site becomes increasingly perfect in a more realistic way - perfect for the audience who use it, rather than 'perfect' for the stakeholders who think they know what different audiences want.
We see this approach taken with all kinds of websites and products - from Apple's iPhones through to online services such as Gmail.
It's time to see more of this approach used with government websites as well.
After all - don't we want to create the 'perfect' website for our audiences' needs?
