You’ll have noticed its been snowing….and there has been lots of twitter action at #uksnow (interesting article on this here). I have been keeping a vague eye on the the council’s using twitter to communicate snow information as these kinds of ‘crisis comms’ needs is one of the ways we see the Virtual Town Hall being used. However I wanted to note what Chorley have been doing as its the best practice I have seen and I am wondering if there is anyone else using twitter in the same way. I’ve grabbed a couple of excerpts below (full feed at http://twitter.com/ChorleyCouncil but things I have noted are:
- The tone – its informative but also informal – just right I think
- They are responding to incoming tweets – and look at the times – this is not just 9-5
- They are giving real time information!
- There is a real sense of a human being here which I think makes all the difference – but they are not actually offering different info to the Council website – just doing it in a way that makes sense in the context of twitter
And also this:
I am sure that many people have seen this but I just wanted to keep a note of it as its such a good example. I thought of doing this as a compare/contrast piece as there are a lot of council’s using twitter to put out press releases etc which I don’t think is nearly as effective as what Chorley are doing – and I started to get fairly judgemetal about the fact. However given that far more council’s are not using it at all I think anyone who is giving this a go needs to be thanked – and I think its better to note the best practice and hope we can learn from it – must be the Christmas spirit!!
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