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Directorate General of Citizen AttentionGeneralitat of Catalonia

Barcelona, 30th March 2010

Twitter in the Government

This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. It allows the reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation to generate a derivative work, without any restriction providing that the author is always cited (Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de la Presidència) and this licence does not contradict any specific licence that an image within this report might have and the rights of the image prevail. The complete licence can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/legalcode.ca.

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking platform for publishing short text messages (up to 140 characters) and communicating with users via web browsers and mobile telephones.

The communication is open on the Internet and there are social networks arising from the users that follow it.

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Twitter Galaxy

Twitter is the web platform, the infrastructure.

The users use multiple applications to manage the editing and publication of messages (like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Echofon, Mixero, Twitux and GTwitter), for transmitting images (Tweetphoto, Twitpic, etc.), for mobiles (Uber Twitter, Open Break, Seesmic, etc.), for metrics (Twitalyzer, etc.)

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Types

These are the basic Twitter mailboxes (profiles):

- Personal

- Corporate, those used by organisations. In this presentation we will focus on this type of mailbox, corporate mailboxes.

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Uses

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For organisations, Twitter is a tool suitable for:

- communicating various types of information (incidents, warnings,emergencies, meeting agendas, invitations, human resource recruitment, etc.)

- informing of new services, articles, publications, posts, press releases, etc.

- for broadcasting events

- for chatting and collaborating, namely, for creating a social network

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Structure of a tweet

Text + shortened link + #hashtag

Twitter Accounts of the Catalan Parliament http://ow.ly/1nfaU #ogov

Music in Creative Commons http://ow.ly/1qF9h #cc

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Elements: tweet text

The information must be short, accurate and concise. It must be properly composed according to the linguistic criteria and graphical conventions (typographical syntax etc.) currently in force in the organisation.

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The links bring added value to the tweet. They must be selected and the trustworthiness of the source checked (examine the author and their history, check the authority of websites, tending towards content from organisations and not so much towards individuals with very personal opinions, etc.).

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Elements: link

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The hashtag denotes the tweet’s topic and it must be short. It is preferable to use those that already exist on Twitter (check which are in use via Twitter’s search engine http://search.twitter.com, for example, ‘administració’).

The hashtags are used to recover information quickly. We can search and filter content using the hashtags, collaborate and share information. They are also an indicator of the most important topics currently on Twitter.

Elements: hashtag

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Retweets RT

1. RT + @nameofretweetedprofile + text + shortened link + #hashtag

RT @Odilas The Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010http://ow.ly/1r6CK #tech

2. Retweeting directly from Twitter and therefore this icon appears

Retweets are tweets from other people or organisations that are published again. They encourage conversation. We can retweet in two ways. The first is to use the initials RT and the tweets have a maximum length of 125-130 characters (according to how many characters in the profile name).

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Network: followings and followers

The tweetsphere (network of people on Twitter) is made up of the users that we follow (followings) and those who follow them (followers). As a general rule, we also call those who follow our profile ‘followers’.

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To manage this communication better, we need specific lists of people or organisations that we should follow more closely because their activity matches our profile well.

Managing the followings using lists

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Measuring the impact

www.twitalyzer.com

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Example of Twitter in the Government

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This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. It allows the reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation to generate a derivative work, without any restriction providing that the author is always cited (Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de la Presidència) and this licence does not contradict any specific licence that an image within this report might have and the rights of the image prevail. The complete licence can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/legalcode.ca.

Directorate General of Citizen AttentionGeneralitat de Catalunya

Barcelona, 30th March 2010

Thank you!Twitter in the Government