Mark Drapeau has crunched some numbers and confirmed my impressions about the opportunities left on the table by government agencies making their first foray onto Twitter -in contrast to other engaged but more personal government staff.

” … there are two categories of government Twitter usage. The first is a faceless entity complete with the office’s seal (“JFCOM” or “FEMA”) that I term the “Enterprise.” The second is an individual advocate representing an agency, most often using their real name and photo; I call this the “Empowered individual.”

Which type – which strategy – is more engaged in the conversation? …

What I found was very revealing. The Enterprises rarely follow anyone, and when they do, those tend to be other Enterprises. In contrast, the Empowered follow many people, often those with no obvious relationship with the government. Empowered entities also tend to deliver messages related not only to work but about other aspects of their lives. …

[Drapeau’s] personal stat is about 53% conversing via @ replies, and [he is] not alone as an Empowered user (“cheeky_geeky”) representing [his] agency yet talking about more personal things. Maxine Teller from Department of Defense Public Affairs (“MixtMedia”) follows almost 100 people, tweets every day of the week, and has about 32% @ replies. Linda Cureton, the CIO of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (“curetonl”), follows about 50 people, also tweets seven days a week, and converses about 18% of the time. Andrea Baker of the Intelligence Community (“immunity”) follows over 300 people, has over 3000 tweets, and @ replies about 36% of the time.

Empowered individuals are like amateur sociologists, constantly talking with the community and learning what’s out there, building relationships, and in return are able to talk about what they are interested in as well; for the government this means that people are able to engage with employees as humans and not as bureaucrats – a PR boon if I ever heard one!”

You only need to look at my exchange with UKParliament, blogged back in August, for confirmation.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Stakeholders, Public Affairs, Messaging, Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.