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Government Using Widgets, Twitter To Take Information To The PeopleGovernment Using Widgets, Twitter To Take Information To The People
One of the ways that social media changes the Web is that social media require you take your message to the people. The game is no longer about attracting people to your Web site -- it's about bringing your content to Twitter and other people's Web sites. That's a lesson that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put into practice in the recent recall of tainted peanut-butter, and that the Ohio Attorney General is using for home foreclosure information.
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One of the ways that social media changes the Web is that social media require you take your message to the people. The game is no longer about attracting people to your Web site -- it's about bringing your content to Twitter and other people's Web sites. That's a lesson that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put into practice in the recent recall of tainted peanut-butter, and that the Ohio Attorney General is using for home foreclosure information.When the CDC needed to alert people about peanut products tainted with salmonella, it turned to Web 2.0 tools to get the word out, according to a report on Federal Computer Week. In the past, the agency would have posted the information to its own Web sites, used toll-free phone lines and alerts sent to the media.
But this time around, the CDC developed a software widget that automatically pulled the latest recall information from an FDA database. Publishers posted the widgets to their Web sites, and got the latest CDC updates automatically distributed to their readers.
CDC made the widget available in early February, and about 16,000 sites, including newspapers, health agencies, and personal Web sites posted the widget, resulting in more than 6.8 million views.
"That viral effect is really pretty amazing," [Janice Nall, director of CDC's Division of E-Health Marketing,] said. "The reach of the widget grows exponentially."
Widgets are designed to be easily included on Web sites, so people looking for the information have vastly more places to find it. CDC offers other widgets such as daily health tips, influenza-outbreak maps and health emergency notifications.
And the Ohio Attorney General's Office is using Twitter search to engage with citizens. For example, many people are looking for information on foreclosures; the Ohio attorney general's office searches Twitter for those people, and then follows up with a response on Twitter.
"We see Twitter as another way to make sure we're answering questions that people have," Meyer said. "It hasn't replaced press releases and action alerts, it is really just a supplement. Social media is just part of our toolset to engage citizens."
Cordray's office also re-posts -- or re-tweets, in Twitter parlance -- questions or information others might find valuable, increasing the likelihood that other Twitter users will see it.
Federal Computer Week doesn't say how the Ohio Attorney General's Office finds people on Twitter with questions on Ohio foreclosures, but I can guess. It ain't rocket science. They probably just go to search.twitter.com, input the search terms "Ohio foreclosures," and read the results. Using Twitter search in that fashion is just about the simplest way that government and business can use social media to help engage with citizens (in the case of government) or customers and partners (for business).
The Federal Computer Week article has a few interesting anecdotes about how government is using social media: "Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools revolutionize government business"; I urge you to give it a read.
One of the more interesting anecdotes talks about the Environmental Protection Agency's Jeffrey Levy, who posts the occasional question about work to Twitter, and gets responses from his Twitter friends. Before Web 2.0, he would have sent out an e-mail or phone calls to his co-workers at the EPA and some peers from professional organizations, but now he often sends a Twitter, where his message can be seen outside his ring of professional contacts.
That's the power of Twitter: It's simple and easy. You don't have to set anything up or configure anything to get started, just sign up for an account, upload your picture (optional, but it's a good idea), and go.
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