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Event Started: 1/26/2012 4:00:00 PM ----------
>>> Thank you. Welcome everybody to engaging audiences with twitter. Right now we're in
the studio here at GSA. We have a good group of people here. We're hoping to put on a very
one of the things that we've tried to do is -- hold on one moment -- is to try to ditch
the slides for a bit and get away from PowerPoint and go into the live environment in social
media and use that to create the narrative that's going to show you all the different
options and different strategies and different things you'll face in starting off a twitter
account or using it a couple years later. With me today I've got to my right Scott from
US geological survey. He is the web and social media chief. Now, to my left we have Stacey,
who is a social media specialist. Of course, across from me we have Tammy from GSA who
will be chiming in at times. Joining us later will be Victoria who is chair at the media.
Basically what we're going to be doing is we're going to start off with creating a twitterer
account and showing you -- twitter account and showing you all the different steps involved
and demonstrating all the different options, different styles in which you can engage that
way and then we're going to have Stacey, Scott and Victoria give talks on what their agency
is do, what they do on handling accounts and engaging with the public. Without any adieu
-- I should mention one more time if you have questions please just jump on twitter and
use the fed tweets hash tag. You can ask questions, make comments, answer other people's questions.
We're really trying to make this very interactive where people can jump in and offer their incites
when they -- insights when they have them. Let's get into it. We start right now twitter.com.
This is what you'll see. I prop prepped up -- this is not my G mail account. We created
it for the purposes of this demo. It all starts with this, taking your e-mail account and
signing up for twitter. Now I want to join twitter today. We have it right here. The
user name is available, thank goodness for fed rock star on twitter. When with selecting
your user name there's a couple different ways you can go about it. If you're setting
up a twitter account for your agency you're going to make it something more official sounding.
We have S under score four, that's his account. You can identify his name by it. I personally
at a at Justin her man for my twitter account because I want people to recognize who I am.
When you're engaging on line, people will start identifying you by your twitter name.
This is not necessarily the time to have, like, you know, I heart kittens or something
like that. Even if you like kittens, this perhaps is not the time to reflect that. Now,
something I have seen -- this is up for speculation a little bit. You're working for an agency
and do your put your agencies name in your twitter name itself? There's some people who
do that. They are very good at twitter. It seems to work for them. I however, personally
would recommend against it. Like we said, you're creating a brand for yourself. Like
I say, my name is Justin and I work for the department of awesome. I wouldn't want any
name personally to be Justin at you awesome. What happened if you -- awesome. What happens
if you leave that agency. You get identified with that agency. It's usually better to keep
those things separate. As you'll see in the bio section, there is times you can link up
some with your agency. Here I want to create my account. If people do have -- thank you,
Tammy for chiming in with that. If people do want to follow along and, you know, set
up a account for the first time this will be a great time to do it. Follow freely. Let's
just see next. We can skip through this. Start following by five. I do not want to -- eventually
we're going to follow these people, no worries. Next. Select topic that you're interested
in. I'm interested in open government. We'll start off with that. Try five more.
>> HOW.
>>> How important is it to have a hash tag for your category?.
>>> We'll show that later. This is for getting through this -- actually, we're going to skip
this step. We're going to walk you through all these processes as it is. So here we go.
This is the basic dash board when you start off. There's some people that you might not
want to follow like Chris brown, unanimous and etc.. We're going to set up the profile.
Let's go to -- let's see on this interface. View my profile page. Just take a moment here.
I want to edit my profile. Now, when you're setting up your twitter account, how you choose
your photo, choose your bio and set it up is absolutely going to shape how you're account
is viewed publicly. Let's start with a picture. You saw initially there was that stream of
information coming down. People are identified by the icons many times that they choose for
your photos. You want to make something that's clear, iconic, instantly recognizable when
there's a flow of information coming down a page. For fed rock star we already have
one up here. We will be able to see that after. Now, name, fed rock star, want to be identified
by, of course you would have your name like, for instance, I'd be Justin her man. For the
location, obvious thing to do is say Washington. westbounding -- Washington DC. You might to
get creative with it, like for instance I used to be in the air force and I was thinking
it would be interesting if they had their location for above and beyond or something
like that. Really the mission of your agency is it within Washington DC or within communities
around the country. We'll leave this at Washington DC, but feel free to think about different
ways you can use that to communicate that message that what you are is either through
out the communities or in some ways fulfilling your mission. Website. Okay. Let's say -- just
say GSA.GOV for lack of better in addition. What -- better of anything. Physical you have
a blog, some people put their twitter stream. Anything that you want to direct people to
and see as part of an extended bio, it could be your link account. Mine is me high fiving
my baby nephew. This is the way people are identified on twitter because as you'll see
later, there's Spam box, robots and all sorts of -- just like in e-mail, there's the princes
of twitter E and you do not -- twitter and you do not want to be associated with them.
The bio section is a perfect way to show some of your professional credentials, some some
personalty you have unique to you. For instance, in my bio I might say social media at the
department of awesome. Now, what that will do is by putting that at sign in front of
it, people will be able to directly link to your federal agency you're working for. Just
like anything when you're publicly putting out information, more you -- the more you
link yourself the more discretion you'll have to use in tweeting. Some people will clearly
say, this is the department I work for. I like the out doors and MA Michigan state band.
A little bit of personalty there. Tweets my own, comments my own or retweets do not authorize,
do not represent an endorsement, something like that caveat that probably your social
media office would want you to have in there. Another way of doing it -- like I said, this
directly links you to the agency. Some people are a little bit more ambiguous about it and
might put something like at social media at the department of awesomeness. You're making
a reference to the mission statement of your agency but you're not directly linking it
to the agency itself. You have a little bit of more room with discretion there. As with
anything that we're covering today, your agency most likely has a social media plan in place
that addresses these topics of personal use of twitter and linking to the agency itself.
One of the first steps you should do is get in touch, find that document and look it over.
If you have any questions, ask the Scott or Stacey's and ask them what's appropriate for
your particular agency. Chances are they're going to love to hear that you're asking that
question and they want you feed back on it. Let's say post -- we don't have to take care
of this right now. As you're going to see later, where it says post your tweets to facebook,
there's all different ways you can integrate twitter within other social media services.
Let's say save changes right now. Thank you. Set ingtings have been said. Next step, just
to customize it more. Once again, the more you customize it and make things look professional
the more it's going to make your feed stand out and tell people that you're aly legitimatement
-- you're a person on line and not a hacked business or something. For the backgrounds
there's all these different options for premaid backgrounds. If you have one of these, it's
obvious to people that you haven't really put much time into it. If you're an agency,
you can do anything from -- it's like having the background on a website. You can have
the logo for the agency, you can have a map. I have one actually -- here's a custom background
that I have loaded up right now. Let's see where we go. It's actually called background
nicely enough. Save changes. Here we go. You know what, here we are about two minutes later
and let's check out the page of what we have so far. All right. Fed rock star, you have
the logo right there. That can be your face, if you're working -- if this is an official
account for your agency it should be the logo. Whatever it is, you want it something that's
easily recognizable in the -- in a thumbnail size. Here we go. Fed rock star has not tweeted
yet. I have the link right there and the bio. Now, what we can do next is -- once again,
you saw before when you had all the information coming down -- hold on. Let me go home and
you can see this. The twitter stream as they call it. It's this hodgepodge list coming
down of people's individual messages. The secret is that most people who use twitter
in a reasonable way do not use it through twitter.com. That's when other services come
in, like -- like I personally use tweet deck in which to manage my accounts and tweets.
I'm going to be demoing hoot sweet. Many people in the federal government do and prefer that.
Scott and Stacey are going to be demoing how they use those two. What we're going to do
is jump right over into hoot sweet and show you that process. Sign up free today. I have
my e-mail address, fed rock star. Well, we would use hoot sweet. Tammy just asked why
we would use that. I'm going to demonstrate that in a second because there's going to
be so much information that is coming -- let's say you're following 500 people. There's no
way you can track that information in one column. Also, when you're looking for specific
conversations like you're following fed tweets, you want to hear what people are saying about
the environment, houses, health care, doing hoot sweet is going to -- tweet deck allows
people to boil down that information and make it easier to show. Hold on. Let's get you
registered up right here. I don't want to receive hoot sweet newsletters. Have there
been any questions or twitter or anything as we go through this?.
>>> One of questions is does reporting Spam really do anything? If you're following somebody
or they're following you and they're harassing you.
>>> We're going to show this in hoot sweet. Spam is a real problem. You will get people
sending you links, trying to get you to click on their link that might be malicious. That's
where it's -- it's like when we were talking about setting up a bio, you don't want to
get mixed into that. If somebody is giving you a hard time, you don't want to block somebody
from your government account but you do have that option of either, you know, blocking
them, just ignore them quite Frankly and there's all different ways of handling it. Just like
an e-mail. Here we go, loading into it now. This might take 15 seconds. Do you have any
comments? One thing that was interesting I think is in choosing that name that some people,
some feds do have their agency identification in the -- you know, in their name itself.
I feel a certain way on it. You know, just is risks and rewards, but do you have any
thoughts on that? >> One of the things that I would trust against
is if you are using it as an official account then -- and you're officially representing
your organization that your work for, it might be something where you would put maybe the
initial of the organization or the acronym. Once you leave your organization, if you leave
the organization, that account because you're writing that brand it's really -- it's really
rep Sven TIFR of the organization -- representative of the organization itself. You might not
want to use your personal account as your personal account. Any time you are going to
do anything official for the organization make sure you're using a separate account
that's officially related to whatever it be. >> Something else we polished over a little
bit, we asked a bunch of people who haven't used twitter before or disagree is -- what?
Okay. I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen. We're having a connection problem because the dash
board is taking a little bit to warm up. There's one thing you can talk about while we're waiting
for this to happen is security and your twitter account. It's often put in the news that when
people really misuse it and run into problems for it, it's blamed on hacking. They yous
say my account is -- they always say my account is hacked. They're account nine times out
out oh of the -- out of the ten was not hacked. Back in the day if somebody replied all to
the e-mail and information went to people it shouldn't have gone to, it was a great
source of comedy and people losing their careers over it. Now today the modern version of it
is sending a direct message, a private message on twitter and you think it's private and
it goes public out to everyone. You don't have to get into specifics on it. High profile
people have had a large source of embarrass. From that. When -- embarrassment from that.
Take care of that. When you're sending a public message, it's supposed to be public and not
private. >> While Justin is talking about, this is
Tammy with GSA and we work with a lot of federal agencies who are setting up social media accounts.
It is vital that you different yhat between your personal account and agency account.
If you have a personal account on twitter, you behave professional there if you're affiliating
yourself. We've seen how this afternoonly fies really well. We had an event that was
going ton a couple months -- going ton a couple -- going on a couple months ago and it was
when everyone reached out to their personal networks and say this is what we're doing
and tweeting on the official account it quad TRUP Led the number of folks looking, impacted
those engaging with the professional account. When you look to adding a personal account,
it's your own personal brand You can use that afternoon fie the good work you're doing for
your agency. mplify the good work you're doing for your agency. >> We're going to try to hop on another service.
This is one of the reasons I don't use hoot sweet because -- well, TAMny's is working
-- well, Tammy's is working. Let's hop over now. We have back up plans to go to tweet
deck and show you there. We'll leave it on this screen for a moment. This is Scott's
twitter screen that you're going to see. Now, let's say I want to start off with adding
a column. The first thing I want to do is search. I want to hear what people are saying
on line about fed tweets. Once again you're using the hash tag. So here we go. We have
fed tweets is now coming up. Also let's say something else. Here we go. We'll see a couple
different things. I'm lead loding up green -- I'm loading up green APPs over here. That's
a surprising competition they did that people are engaging on twitter over. Let's add those
columns. Let's go. In this column you see all the conversations that you're having.
Now, if you use this to now explain the different ways in which you can tweet, how to increase
your twitter follower category. Okay. What I'm going to do -- what?
>> Make sure you check my name there, please. >> We don't want to -- give me a moment here.
What this does is when I -- you saw over there I went to go retweet. I want to make a comment
in here. What do I say, how do you increase your twitter traffic and follower account?
By engaging. That is the best way to do it. Now, you'll notice that in answering somebody's
question on twitter I didn't just do the response, I left her question in there because quite
Frankly everything that you put on twitter is like having a conversation. Think about
it, what you're tweeting, would you say that, would you want to engage in a conversation
the way somebody is communicating. Let's say you're answering a question and don't give
the context of what the question is, it's basically -- the only person who knows who
you're talking about is the person who answered the question, not the 500 or 5,000 people
who are following you. It's quite rude. By engaging I didn't -- let's say use some hodgepodge
terms or anything like that, it's just clear for the communication. You do not want to
be the type of person that causes somebody's left eye to twitch because they see the letter
U being used as you or something to that effect. Be clear, concise and also leave the hash
tag in there to continue the conversation. Here we go. We respond right there. That should
come up MOMENT momentarily. You want to keep it in there, quote the tweet. Another thing
that you can always do -- whoops -- is that you can actually change up a little bit. Let's
say to get you to a twitter account, TASH tag, a tag filing system or -- hash tag, a
tag miling system, you want -- filing system, you want to file it. You have to have it under
140 characters. When you write tweets you want to keep them as short as possible to
give people room to reresponsibled spond -- respond to you. By deleting a couple words you're
not changing the content, just the amount of words involved. I can say great, something
to that effect. Let's see. Let's say that's respond together tweets -- responding to tweets.
If you have to have original contents here, having a great time at fed tweets. There's
different things you can do. You can embed a photo or embed on image right here. You
can set it on a timer and schedule your tweets. Personally I don't like that because it can
be very uncomfortable if something comes out on the wrong time.
>> There are those of us in the room who will use scheduling. We'll talk about that with
some of the agencies after wards. This isn't about your personal account, this is about
a strategic agency account. If we know something is going to happen at 10:00 the next morning
we get it prepared other time. >> That being time there's been uncomfortable
situations where people tweet about somebody after they passed away that morning or something
like that. Here we go. Once again, I can go provide direct message right here. Let's say
I want to direct message to Tammy right there. I'm having a great time at fed tweets. That's
a private message I'm sending to Tammy. If accidentally -- okay. So having a great time
at fed tweets. Sorry, we just got disextracted looking -- distracted. You want to make sure
that if you're sending a direct message that it is something that -- I mean, you still
can get judged on it. It's like sending an e-mail. If there is a conversation that you're
having directly between people on direct message and it's getting long, get off of direct message,
especially if it's anything that's can be controversial or sensitive. Message and say
something like, you know, let's take this to e-mail or something like that. Once again,
it's the risks and rewards. You don't want to put yourself in a situation -- if you're
using this on a mobile device, that you accidentally tweet something that was meant to be sensitive.
Due to the -- oh, there's a question. >> We have a question. Can we briefly mention
how to make a business case to top management why an agency should be using twitter? From
the perspective of those of us who are teaching social media, this ends up in the place of
were you customer, where is the public you need to be talking to. Stacey is going to
address this specifically if her presentation. >> I'm going to address this specifically.
In terms of making a business case you need to show -- the conversation is already going
on. You can use analytics to show the numbers of people who are able to get messages and
to engage in different topics that are related to what you do. It's not just about followers,
retweets, it's about both of those along with total engagement and out reach.
>> There we go. All right. So actually we're going to be wrapping up this segment pretty
soon. What we've done is we tried to demonstrate how easy it is to get started and to set up
your account and already start engaging. As you can see, from the time we went from the
G mail account to setting up twitter, customizing it, loading it up into hoot sweet or in this
case tweet deck takes less than a half an hour. This isn't a large burden on your part.
The interesting part happens is once you start loading in fed tweets, green APPs and can
start engaging instantly. Something we demonstrated that I'm not -- like my account isn't following
anybody expect for Chris brown right now regretfully. By following hash tags and using these search
terms you can put yourself in larger conversations and engage with people. You can find a community
or building a new community. Of course you can probably tell there's a million other
questions that could have happened along the way. Just to wrap it up, getting on line and
starting engaging is easy. As long as you follow the right steps and take care, there's
many different styles and options. Depending on what out comes you want, whether it's -- of
course, everyone is very interested in increased customer service. Let's say you want to have
more people coming to your website, you want to have people participating in a -- you want
on line buzz to turn into action. There's all sorts of different paths that you're going
to be able to take and use these tools for a simple way. While you're working, you can
just go like that, minimize it an it's on in the background and t not like you have
to stand -- and it's not like you have to stand there all way stairing at the screen.
With that said, let's go onto our next part of it and Stacey is here. No, Vicki is here.
Excellent. Vick Victoria, chair of new web media is actually calling in from over there
today where she is at a leadership seminar. As we know, social media people are not just
engagers, they're leading in they're -- leaders in their communities. Vicki are you there?
>> Are you hear me -- can you hear me? >> Yes.
>> All right. Good. There's a bit of a delay it seems. Sorry about that. Thank you so much
for asking me to participate. I appreciate you being so flexible with my crazy schedule.
This is really great to be here. It looks like hoot sweet is down for me right now.
In any case, I have a couple of visuals to throw up while I'm talking. For a bit of background,
the national space museum is one of 19 museums and research centers. We have two locations,
the main museum in Washington DC and the center in Virginia. As many of your probably know,
our mission is to increase knowledge. At space our know KUS is to inspire the public. Our
on line out reach is tied to our educational mission. When it comes to twitter, specifically,
we are looking to education and inspire audiences that are interested in topicings of aviation
-- topics of aviation and science. Of obviously we want to increase access with our expert,
our content, collections. We want to provide some behind the scenes into our activities.
We want to be more conversational and acceptable to people. We want to connect with our audience
in new ways, involve them in the lives of the museum. We want to listen to what our
audience is saying. We get really valuable feed back from them. We can learn a lot about
how to improve our out reach efforts. We do promote things that are happening at the physical
museums. We try and provide a lot of content and engagement and access to things via web
cast or whatever it might be for folks who cannot make it to the museums physically.
What do with -- what do we tweet? We tweet a variety of things. What we began with is
our history series. Every day we'll tweet about things that happened this DMA history
and link -- this day in history and link to our resources and try to engage folks and
encourage them to inquire and learn more. This often sparks conversation with folks.
That's really great. We engage in that. Sometimes we'll take these days in history and phrase
them in such a way to make it more of an interaction with our audience. So we might phrase it as
a question or a quiz or some kind of request for feed back and start a conversation that
way. We have a lot of people sharing personal storieses, -- stories, which is a lot of fun.
We try to have some current events, like if NASA has a launch going on. We don't really
focus entirely on what we're seeing, we try to contribute our knowledge and access to
broader conversations that are going on in the social state. Duo a lot of listening -- we
do a lot of listening. As far as keeping folks engaged we have live events. Sometimes we'll
tweet from lectures or programs in realtime and take questions from our experts on twitter.
Our telescope on the mall, they have their own twitter account and they tweet about what
they're currently viewing through the telescope and sometimes point to the live web cam and
take questions. We've also participated in events taking place. We just announced a new
tweet up that's going to start registration tomorrow. If unit -- if you want to come and
see behind the screens, sign up. If you haven't hard of tweet ups before, it's live, in person
events for people who share on twitter. It's an opportunity to cross over between the social
media face and a physical face. It gives us an opportunity to show people things that
are behind the scenes that they don't typically have access to and they share it with a much
broader audience than we could. It actually creates a much richer and engaging learning
environment. One of our first big events was the become a pilot day. I should back up.
Our first official tweet up was in partnership with NASA. You should look up NASA tweet up,
it's an amazing example of how to engage a community. We learned how to do it right from
them. We had a tweet up for our pilot day. It was a great event. We plan on doing many
more. Justin, you can tell me if I ran out of my five minutes already. I don't want to
take all your time. . >> We can wrap it up. Somebody asked a question
from the feed. How do you guys determine who you follow?
>> I'm sorry. How do we determine who we follow? >> Yes. Who do you follow or how do you determine
that? >> Well, that's a really good question. I
think a lot of that comes out of how your personal -- how your organization evolves.
We started out by following other museums and other folks who are in our industry or
in our subject matter. It's grown and expanded from there. I think it's probably going to
expand even more. There's actually been some museums that followed individuals. I'm kind
of on the fence about tweet stalking. Some folks in the public are not entirely comfortable
with being follow -- followed by a museum. We will create a list for our tweet up attenDees
and follow individuals who are staff members or folks who are intimately involved in museums
in some way. That's an ongoing kind of thing that each organization defines on their own
and evolves as they progress. >> All right. Thank you very much. Next up
we're going to be talking with Stacey, who has been here all day with us actually. All
right. Scott would like to actually step up to the plate first. Scott workings at the
U.S. geological survey as the web and social media chef. They have earthquake.GOV. If you
have not checked this out, many of the twitter accounts you'll want to. It's brilliant. Very
excited to hear from him today. . >> Thanks, Justin. First I wanted to thank
Justin for offering up my account as a lam for this -- no, I think it's a great idea.
. >> Any time.
>> So Justin and others have given you a good run through of twitter so far. What I want
to talk about specifically is how USGS we are managing our accounts from a brand perspective.
You know, twitter is obviously a great way to push out messages to whatever you want
to communicate from your organization. One of the things that we like to focus on is
the customer service side of it. We're interacting, responding directly to people, bridging that
gap between the government and the public. What we try to do, we do that through three
different methods. We do it through using our at a mentioning, through direct messages
or private messages and do it by involving people with our science and our information
using hash tags. We'll switch right over here to -- where are we at here? So right now what
we have on the screen is we have our at mentions from USGS. These are people that are responding
to us, writing questions or responding to us in general. We are mentions USGS in many
forms here. We try to follow these mentions of USGS and try to respond to people. We'll
do it through two different ways, one, we can respond right back to the person by doing
something such as right here where we said someone has asked a question an respond to
that person first. The other way is we can prefix our response. The reason we would do
that is because perhaps the question they asked is something we thought the rest of
our followers should see because it was great information or a great question. We will add
a little bit of information ahead of time and say thanks for the question, here's a
way to find out more information about that solar STOORM storm -- storm or whatever. That's
a way to send out a response and let everybody know they're engaging with people and responding
to them. Another way that we use twitter for interacting with people are through direct
messages. Sometimes there are messages that are probably better -- we might not be able
to answer the question right away, but we may have a scientist or some person in one
of the programs that can respond directly to that person. We'll use a direct message
and provide them with a phone number of the actual person or e-mail address. We'll do
that as a private message an we'll respond and say we can't really answer that right
now but we can give you the name of a person and their phone number, you can call them
and they'll answer that for you. It's something that's been appropriate for that individual.
We'll respond back to them directly rather than putting it out to however many followers
we have right now. That's just a nice way as well to show that customer service an the
interaction between our organization and the person that's asking the question. The last
way we like to engage people is get them engaged with science and learn more about what we
do. Duo that through be -- we do that through using hash tags. We like to use hash tags
and finding ways we can relate our information to those trends and share that our followers
but also using hash tags for specific public out reach campaigns. For example, RIEKT now
the USGS is celebrating its 100-year anniversary of the volcano. One of the things duo is we'll
go through using the tool like tweet deck or something and we can start seeing a search
for people that are mentioning USGS volcano. This is a way for us to track mentions of
that particular campaign. The other thing that we'll do is we'll use hash tags for ways
of leading science to trends that are happening. Not too young ago the must have ^ MUFT movie
came out and there was a oil person that was drying to drill for oil and he wanted to destroy the
theater to get to the oil. We do oil and gas assessments. It was a perfect opportunity
for us to tweet about the oil and gas assessments we do and add on a hash tag such as MUFTs
and related the science to what was happening in current events or with folks that might
not think about USGS in that term but now that we related it to something they're familiar
with they become more aware of us and the things we do. It's a gaugeway of engage -- it's
way of engaging people, getting them involved. Maybe they might have questions about that
particular topic an we can respond to those questions. So that's really the three methods,
the at mentions, the direct messages and hash tags. Any brand, any organization, your agency,
you can get engaged better with the public, get more information out and start engaging
a conversation that's happening. I will leave with one story before I switch it over. Back
in -- to kind of point out that customer service is key to this, back in 2008 the USGS account
started on twitter. In 2009 we took over that account. We never owned that account for a
whole year. TWRO -- two years later we were managing the account with two or three people.
We had about 80,000 followers an that's not too bad. It's a good indication of how well
you're doing. For three years we had 80,000 followers. Once we end GIJed -- got our customer
service folks involved with the account and really started to do more of the proactive
response, hash tags, we doubled that number in six months. Because of the direct interaction
we had with folks and the row responses -- and the responses we were giving it really, really
made a difference as far as how people saw us using the account and them reaching out
to us, us reaching out to them. It does make a big difference. I would urge you to, you
know, be responsive and treat your account as a customer service account, but you can
send out messages that you need to. >> All right. We have a question from somebody
for you. Once again, it seems like there's a lot of conversation right now about exactly
who should agencies be following on twitter or allow you approach that. What about you,
Scott? >> So one of things that -- we don't -- our
account, we don't follow a whole lot of people, just following other USGS accounts. You can
look at following your business partners, people that engage you that you have official
partnerships with already and start engaging with them. Most of those folks are probably
on twitter already or there are folks that will work for those -- that work for those
organizationings s that are on twitter -- organizations that are on twitter.
>> Now, the question is administrators and superviseers may use the following groups
of enforcements of those INTties. Some of the white house accounts have the caveat are
saying follow does in the equal endorsement or retweet does not equal endorsement. Is
there a specific policy behind is that or is it just common sense to do that?
>> I think -- you know, it kind of shows that you're not being bias, endorsing one side
or another, especially if you're an agency that deals with politics. Tour careful with
that -- you have to be careful with that. What you might have heard in the past it's
all follow all or follow none. I like to take the middle ground approach where it's follow
your partners, your business people, people that you have official partnerships with.
I think that's a great way to manage your followers. Talk to your lawyers, ethics folks
about going further if you are interested in following other people that might cross
that line. >> Thank you very much, Scott. Next up we
have Stacey. She is the social media specialist and web content lead at the U.S. consumer
product safety commission. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm just going
to try to get my account stuff up here really quick. We had several windows open so give
me just a second. In terms of the question about how -- about who to follow, it's really,
you know -- you know, as Scott said about getting lawyers involved, when you're at an
agency like ours when we deal with business a lot we do not follow businesses but we formed
groups of types of people we want to follow. We want to follow mommy bloggers, big news
organizations. Rather than have to go peace mail, we can get approval for different groups
of people that we want to follow who we can engage with. That's where I find a middle
ground. I am the social media specialist at the consumer product safety commission. Our
agency is a small agency with a small budget. That means that we have to do a lot of things
scrappily. Unlike some of what Scott is doing with a lot of people on twitter, I am the
main person on twitter. We're starting to engage is few other people in the agency to
work on there with me. Right now I am our social media voice. I'm all of our media.
I work out of our communications office. It gets very busy. We're an agency that covers
the product safety of act 15,000 consumer products. If you think about the hash tags
and -- that justice and Scott were -- Justin and Scott were showing you, those are very
specific. Wish I could pull up my sweet account because it has a lot of detail on who you
can have. You can have ten streams along one link. So I have -- I'm safety stream one,
two and three. A lot of terms that we're following -- the conversation isn't just about the conversation
I'm putting out there, it's about the conversation that's happening around a topic that's important
to us. For instance, around any big storm -- big carbon monoxide message, I will enter
conversations. I use sweet and twitter fall. Twitter fall is a very good quick scan of
what's going on. AF will the of different issue I have a lot -- I have a lot of different
searchs I can mark things and father or mother quickly. I recommend whoever is following
having two screens at your desk. It really helps. Another really big deal for us is, you know, if you look at the -- on
safety account which is our agency account, it has 13,500 followers, a number that we're
happy with and we want to continue to grow it and grow it as fast as possible. So all
of you follow us. If I went to my senior leadership and I said that we have just 13,500 followers
and this is the number of retweets and it's just a few hundred retweets we would not get
a lot of support. We get support because there's 200 million people who are using twitter today.
So that's a big potential reach. Beyond that, we also use something called tweet reach.
Tweet reach has some free reports. We pay for0001-- but it's not a whole lot. It was
a credit card purchase for us for the entire year. We pull reports on everything we're
doing. I'm trying to look for a piece of it here. We had a research target recall that
we can see -- it didn't just go to our 13,000 followers. Because we have so many different
out lets we're using to get a message out, we can see who our inFLUNLs are. In this case,
conconsumer reports -- consumer reports. In other cases we've had a lot of -- I lost that.
In a lot of other cases we have a lot of mommy blogger groups, social moms. MS NBC breaking
news will tweet us. A lot of the out reach I do is geared towards engaging with influence
Als. I will use my personal account to engage media in particular and mommy bloggers rather
than the agency account. I try to make a distinction. With the lawyers and the way that our agency
is structured, there's a -- it's towing a line. If I use my personal account, hey, at
breaking news, did you see this big recrawl, they are -- recall, they are likely tweet
it. MS NBC listens to me. I don't send them everything. I send them certain levels, just
like any news person would do. If I have a big parent recall, I will engage with social
moms and other mommy bloggers and say here is what -- here's what's going on. I will
direct them on my account and I will at message them. I saw a question earlier about what
is the difference between an at and hash tag. An at is engaging with a person, a hash tag
is a conversation. As you're looking at different toll TOOLs that -- tools that might work for
you, I came across ice rocket. It's something you can put in any term and you can KWIly
see -- and you can quickly see what's going on as well. It's ran are by melt water buzz.
We have been looking at a lot of different twitter tools to try to manage engagement
and analytics all together. We've seen some good tools out there. Melt water ^ had has
some. -- has some. They send to be the expensive type. If you're an agency that can handle
that you might want to look at that with the rest of the analytics you are doing on twitter.
The last thing I have to talk about is just, you -- you know, I've head people come -- I've
had people come in my office saying shouldn't you be creating the news. The real point of
twitter is the conversations are going on, you need to enter the conversation and teach
people that you're there, that you have good information for them. For instance, the last
thing is yesterday we had -- I had someone tweeting fox news about consumer product safety
complaints and wouldn't it be great to have this data. We have, we have a website that
has consumer product safety reports, but not enough people know about it yet. I entered
his conversation and said, hey, we have them. Go look ate at it. I sweeted it to him, to
fox news. That's where the conversation was. You know, he learned something and hopefully
fox news learned something too. >> All right. Thank you very much. TWLAPs
up the prez -- that wraps up the presentation part of this. We're going to spend the last
five minutes going through questions and answers. We have a little -- we had a little bit of
challenge with hoot sweet. When you're setting these things up personally or through your
agency give yourself options. Stacey has a wealth of different sites she goes to the
collect analytic ossen. If there is -- analytics on. If there is that problem, like hoot sweet
not working, we can jump over to tweet deck, have different options. Your mission or your
purpose, your event is not jeopardized in any way. Think about those options. Any questions
and answers that we can provide now at this time? I saw earlier Sara out ma Massachusetts
was mentioning about hash tags, that if you use too many hash tags it makes it -- it makes
you look crazy. Essentially think of this way, when you put a hash tag in your tweet
you're connecting with a conversation. You're putting a purpose behind it. If you use too
many of them, you're like the person in the office who uses like five exclamation points
and a smiley face in every one of your e-mails. You look Spammy, you look crazy. It makes
it very confusing to people. You don't what about -- you don't want to be that person.
Nobody does. That person is any -- in my office is known as Justin regretfully. Use them wisely,
maybe only two per tweet. There #01: Other questions that -- is there any other questions
that you see TAMny that people are asking -- Tammy that people are asking?
>> If you're wondering how to find the fed tweets hash tag, go to search.twitter.com
and type in fed tweets and anything you are looking for will show up. A question that's
coming up is how to monitor your conversations, how do you get the good stuff versus just
the randomness that's coming out and information over load?
>> Is that something you'd like to handle Stacey?
>> Yeah. I have a lot of different ways that I try to get information. I use feeds into
my e-mail. That is unbelievably helpful. What you need to do is try to have a bunch of streams
that refine your searchs as best you can. Sometimes it's really not easy. For instance,
we have recrawls. We have, if -- recalls. If I try to do recall, that's also a word
that means -- memory and people use it. Searchs on twitter seem to be very particular. For
instance, if you try to search recall it might not pull up recalling. You do just have to
keep playing around with it. The best thing I can say is try and try again.
>> The way that I approach it is interact with people who engage with you. If you bring
rubbish to the table and your tweets are inKOE HERNT, loaded with unnews hash tags the people
are going to engage with you in the same way and make it more difficult. If you take time
to compose your messages, give thoughtful responses, people will see that and that's
how they're going to engage with you. Be the change you want to see in the world, he's
on twitter. The thought is that what you bring to the table the community most times is going
to bring that back to you. >> It's always a great option to use twitter
lists to create the lists of the people that you want to follow. So you may have people
you're following in the general public and out there at other agencies but you want to
create specific movers and shakers, the thought leaders and we do that on our account so that
we know when news is breaking, when someone in our field is doing something that we need
to know about. We don't want to be day late by looking back over 10,000 twitter messages.
Lists are portable anywhere. >> As we're demonstrating right now on the
screen, US geological survey has a lists. One is all the different USGS accounts and
the other one is all the department of interior accounts. I have private lists that -- for
instance, we're able to see this now. I have a private list called open government Spam
free, which is all the open government people I want to hear from, not the people that are
Spam bottoms or anything like that -- Spamming or anything like that. We want to continue
this conversation using the fed tweet's hash tag even after this session is done. There
will be more sessions in the future. Every day we're on twitter. You can see the community
is here answering questions for you. You don't have to wait for another webinar. You can
keep all this conversation going. Is there anything else that anybody would like to add
before we wrap up? All right. Thank you very much to Scott, TAMny, SKA d -- Tammy, Vicki.
Once again, everyone thank you for participating today. Remember, keep the conversation going
on fed tweets and be sure to please send us some feed back on us. As we said, this is
a great opportunity to start trying to do live demos of things without doing slides.
While we run into issues like earlier, these are things you're going to face using social
media. Thank you very much. >>
>> Thank you, Justin. I would like to personally thank Justin, Scott, Tammy and vickty for
an -- Vicki for an engaging webinar. Thank you again. Just a couple of quick notes, the
first thing is in your chat box everyone will see a link to a survey. We ask that you take
to time to give us your feed back because it's viable to us. Secondly, we have our 2012
government new media conference coming up. It -- it will be May 16th through 17th. There's
early bird registration hope still. We have an amazing in person one day seminar called
essentials of video, the instructor will be Joe. Please visit our site at how to.GOV to
sign up. With that said, everyone have a great day. Thank you.
>> [Event concluded.]