September 2008 Archives

The article below includes a variety of thoughts on how Web 2.0 is being used in business-- including thoughts from me on how we use Web 2.0 at GovDelivery which is something we've been talking about a lot lately.  It's interesting to see that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the only sites mentioned more than once.  Clearly, critical mass matters in any social network.  It's hard to have a network without members.  Still, the power of Twitter is clear by the fact that it is smaller, but still gets a lot of positive feedback.  I'm sure it will continue to grow exponentially.

I took an informal survey of our government clients.  I looked up 20 clients (individuals working at government agencies that work with us).  I found that all but two of them were on LinkedIn or Facebook.  15 of them were on both. 

Obviously, our clients are Web managers and are inclined to use these tools, but I think we could all infer a lot about the increased use of Web 2.0 in government over the coming years by looking at what individual Web managers are doing and by looking at how campaigns are using Web 2.0 today which will undoubtedly translate into a new wave of elected officials and deputies that want to see Web 2.0 put to use in government.

We've been looking at different Web 2.0 sites and exploring how best clients can use them in conjunction with our system and on their own.

One site I like is Twitter.  Twitter allows an organization or an individual to post a couple of lines about what they are doing at a given moment.  This overlaps with the Facebook "status" update so I thought it wouldn't be worth the effort.  However, now that I've got Twitter working well with Facebook, I can update my status on Twitter and it gets posted everywhere.  Twitter is easier to use and something that can be updated quickly from a cell phone or blackberry.

I don't have any specific ideas yet for interconnections between GovDelivery and Twitter, but in looking around, I did see a lot of Twitter accounts being managed by government agencies and public officials.  Take a look at the GovDelivery Twitter Account and Who We are Following.  You can also take a look at my "young" Twitter account.

Here are just a few:
http://twitter.com/pueblo81009
http://twitter.com/USAgov

NASA has many offices and programs using Twitter.  As usual, they are very advanced in use of Web 2.0 tools.

and lots of public officials:
http://twitter.com/MayorMark
http://twitter.com/MayorRTRybak

Why does this matter?  Any government entity has a lot of information to offer.  Twitter is an easy way to pull forward and call attention to the information that you think might be most interesting or valuable.  I've blogged before on the difference between "give me what I want" content and "give me what you think I need" content. 

Twitter allows an agency to highlight for me the information that I might need and to do it in a simple and interesting way.