Skip to main content

What Is Twitter?



Twitter. It’s for keeping in touch with friends, say some, it’s for sharing ideas say others, it’s for promoting your organisation and getting your message out to the world, say more.

This is not what Twitter is; this is what you can do with Twitter.

Twitter at a basic level is an online database of information that can be read and written to by much of the world’s population who own a computer or other device capable of connecting to the Internet.

It’s not until you look at it like this that you can realise its full potential. What’s more the nice people at Twitter provide an API to make it easy to query and extract the data. You can select tweets by user, list, hashtag, phrases or words in the tweet and more.

If this all sounds a bit nerdy that’s because it is, so here’s a practical example of what can be achieved. This page here displays Tweets from everyone who’s in this list and have used the hashtag #geotagtest. It displays the four most recent images attached toTweets that fit this criteria and it will also display the 100 latest Tweets on a map where the user has added a location to their Tweet.

This approach means that Twitter becomes a very simple to use but amazingly powerful management tool for small pieces of website content. Users could be sitting in an office, or standing in a field and (so long as they have an internet connection) can contribute to this page.

Not only does this have potential for covering events, it would also be useful in an Emergency Operation situation where information needs to be contributed and distributed to and from various locations and the public.

So next time you’re asked “What is Twitter”, tell them it’s an online database with 140 million users; what they choose to do with this data is entirely up to them.

Do you have any new ideas for using Twitter for micro content management? Would you like to know more? You can discuss this with me on Twitter @PhilRumens.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Nina Athena24 July 2019 at 08:55

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts and knowledge on this topic. This is really helpful and informative, as this gave me more insight to create more ideas and solutions for my plan. I would love to see more updates from you.

    Social Media Services

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and
5 comments
Read more

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to
6 comments
Read more

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it
1 comment
Read more

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h
1 comment
Read more

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit
1 comment
Read more