May 2009

***Trivia answer: Burger King***

White House Social Media Initiatives: Are They Doing It Wrong?

The White House recently launched membership in three of the most popular social media sites: Facebook.com/Whitehouse, MySpace.com/whitehouse and Twitter.com/whitehouse. The White House initiatives highlight ongoing questions about government use of social media: Is citizens' privacy protected? Is it appropriate? Is it effective?

When a citizen "friends" a government agency on MySpace, the agency gains access to a variety of information about the citizen. How should the government agency use that information, The New York Times wonders:

The privacy advocates’ biggest concern is that most social networks treat a government agency no differently than a former roommate. People might friend the White House on MySpace, for example, to indicate support for the president or to get messages about what the administration is doing. In doing so, however, they are agreeing that every party photo, love poem, and wisecrack from a friends that appears on their profiles will be visible to White House Web masters. And so far there are no guidelines that say whether those Webmasters might keep copies of any of personal information they see or send it to the government officials who could use it to get authorization to audit people’s taxes, keep them from boarding an airplane, tap their telephones or even arrest them.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control is providing swine flu information on social networks. Often, when people are sick, they'll share that information on their social networks. Should the CDC use social networking information to track the spread of the disease?

This isn't a problem on all social networks -- Facebook, for example, lets government agencies, businesses, and celebrities, create "fan pages" that don't give the operators access to other users' information.

Similarly, how should government presence on social media sites be juxtaposed with advertising?

Jeff Chester, the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, added a concern about how the interaction of people with the government might be captured and used for advertising. Is it acceptable for people who look up interest rate information at the Federal Reserve to then receive mortgage offers, he asked?

“We don’t want access to government information to become a digital bazaar, where the attractive digital interactive come-ons might conflict–and even confuse—users,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Another question raised by government use of social media: Is it effective? Government uses social media to get messages out to citizens, and to field complaints, but we've yet to see social media fulfill its promise for collaboration with citizens, says Beth Noveck, deputy director for Open Government, within the Office of Science and Technology policy at the White House.

"We see examples of civic participation, but it's divorced from government itself," she said. "We see example of how government responds to complaints...but they don't engage people in the process, nor do they track progress."

In other words, the marriage of social networks and government has been pretty much a one-way street so far. Lots of "noise" coming in, but very little in the way of collaborative solutions, based on citizen participation, coming out.

She described efforts under way to resolve the problem, including Harvard University's Group Brain Project and the US Patent Office's Peer-to-Patent Project, designed to reduce the time for patent reviews.

TechCrunch was underwhelmed by the new White House initiatives, and questioned whether the MySpace advertising undercut the dignity of the White House:

Other than the blog post with the video, there isn’t much to the page other than a few links to Whitehouse.gov and to Obama’s and Vice President Joe Biden’s MySpace pages, as well as a link to some playful White House photos. The whole page seems designed to humanize Obama and help younger voters relate to him.

There are no ads on the page, but if you click through to photos page, then you do get some ads. The ad beside this photo of the president running down a hallway with his daughter’s puppy says, “Pimp My Profile.” Not very Presidential.

VentureBeat was also underwhelmed, but optimistic:

Hopefully, these pages will follow the same pattern as the administration’s other web efforts — they start out underwhelming, but improve eventually. For example, the White House blog originally contained little more than repackaged press releases, but it has become chatty and conversational. Meanwhile, until recently, the Recovery.gov site for learning about how the $787 billion stimulus package gets spent lacked any real data. Hopefully, with the White House’s new Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, we’ll soon see many more improvements in this vein.

InformationWeek: Mitch Wagner

 

Nine Twitter tips for business

How to strike the right balance when using this popular messaging service

 

1. Don’t automate it

If you’ve got a blog that’s connected to your business, you can use a service such as TwitterFeed to directly channel your new blog posts into Twitter posts. Sounds nifty, doesn’t it? Well, don’t do it. Your business’s primary Twitter feed ought to be hand-fed. If you publish a flood of impersonal links, your Twitter account will just seem like a faceless promotion machine. And that’s not any way to engage people on Twitter. Link to the very best stuff on your blog, as well as relevant stuff you see elsewhere on the web, and also post items that don’t contain links at all.

2. Be conversational

 

Your business’s Twitter account should talk like a person—even if it’s a collective “person” representing your company or brand. Think of your Twitter account as a character in a little Internet play—it’s a walking, talking personification of your entire company. If you feel like it, take it to the limit: Use the first-person (“They’re putting my stuff on sale again!”), invent a personality. Or just use the royal “we” and “our”—”Our editors have the latest on so-and-so.” But be chatty.

Some companies prefer to disclose members of their team when they’re tweeting from the company account. That’s a valid approach, too. For example, the clever group-tweeting service CoTweet (currently in beta) can automatically append your initials to the tweets you make while representing your company. (Macworld is testing out this service to see if it makes it easier for a group of our editors to jointly operate our various Twitter accounts.)

3. Follow people who are relevant

From your Twitter account, follow everyone on your staff who uses Twitter. Follow colleagues in related companies and in your industry. Follow relevant brands and journalists and pundits in your market, even those who compete with you. It’s polite to follow people. And by following people you are creating an ecosystem—people will see who you are following and consider those as suggestions for users they should follow as well.

4. Make sure your people are on Twitter, and refer to them

Individuals tweet different things than companies. It’s okay for your company’s employees to talk about making waffles or going out for drinks, as well as what they’re working on. Not everyone will embrace Twitter, but many of them will—and even the most personal stuff that leaks on to Twitter can help make stronger personal connections with colleagues and audience members alike.

This being said, you need to be aware of who your employees are—and make them aware that everything they write on Twitter (unless they’re using a “protected account” that limits access) is public. If there’s someone who works for your company whose Tweets are a bit risque, you should consider whether or not you want to refer to them from your company’s account. An alternative is to ask employees to create two Twitter accounts—one for work matters and one for their personal lives—and keep them separate.

Once your people are on Twitter, they’ll be able to mention what they’re working on—and reference the brand via Twitterspeak. For example: “Just wrote a cool story for @macworld about the iPod shuffle.” That will drive followers to your company’s Twitter account.

Likewise, your brand’s account can drive followers to your people. For example: “Our very own @vacuumguy thinks the new Dyson is awesome: tinyurl.com/example”

5. Answer your mentions

People will refer to your company’s account as if it were a person. You should reply to tweets that mention you, when relevant. This will give your account more personality and will make those people feel engaged directly with the brand. For example, a person might ask you a question directly: “@macworld Hi. Do you know when Apple will enable SMS message forwarding on the iPhone? Thanks.” “@janevans35 Apple’s not saying, but we hope it’s with the next major software release!”

6. Search for your name

Beyond mentions, which are specific references to your Twitter account, there are probably people using Twitter to talk about your business. Use Twitter’s powerful search features to find those references, either from the Twitter Web site, a Mac-based Twitter client program such TweetDeck or Tweetie that supports saved searches, or even via your RSS reader by subscribing to the RSS feed linked to from every Twitter search results page. There are a lot of companies offering great customer service and support on Twitter by watching what people say about them. When I groused on Twitter about my bad luck finding a JetBlue flight from Oakland to Boston, within a half an hour I had received a reply from the JetBlue Twitter account with an explanation.

7. Consider creating sub-accounts for sections of your business or customer base

If you’re part of a big enough company, consider creating smaller, more targeted accounts. Starting a new section of your site devoted only to fans of the banjo? It might be worth starting a new @joesmusicbanjo account, then Tweeting about it from your company’s main account: “Banjo lovers rejoice! Welcome our new friend, @joesmusicbanjo to the party!”

8. Use Twitter to ask your customers questions…and get good answers

Twitter is a great way to get answers to questions. Trying to figure out what your customers want to see or are interested in? Use Twitter to ask them. Sure, it’s not a scientific survey, but it can give you an immediate snapshot of the zeitgeist. This can be both instructive and productive. About five minutes before I went into a product briefing with Apple, I used Twitter to ask readers what they wanted to know. I ended up with dozens of great questions, and used them as the framework for the article I wrote after the briefing was over.

9. Be a good Twitter citizen

Can you persuade your Twitter followers to promote you to their followers? Sure, but be mindful: He who has the most followers doesn’t necessarily win. If you get people to promote you to their friends in order to win a prize or enter a sweepstakes, you may end up creating a harmful backlash. I’ve seen it happen myself: Recently, a software-deals site offered a free program to anyone who would tweet about its bundle to his or her friends. The people who tweeted were rewarded, but many of their friends felt like they were receiving spam. Even though the people who tweeted were complicit in the act, it was the company that induced the tweeting that received the bulk of the criticism. The etiquette of Twitter is still evolving—be wary.

Even if you’re not the type of person who uses Facebook or Twitter yourself, there’s no denying that these new forms of connection and communication are powerful and becoming increasingly important. That’s why your business should be on Twitter now.

Macworld: Jason Snell