Talking about Twitter, a local government officer recently asked why?
A better question would be when?
The treatments for each of these social networks may be different. It may be that sending out three bulletins a week on MySpace might be all that the folks on MySpace want. But if you’ve signed up for the Barack Obama Twitter feed, you want information from us at least once a day.
I think that a challenge for organizations moving forward is to figure out how much information supporters want and where they want that information. Do they want it on their phone. Do they want it from their Facebook account. Do they want it on e-mail?
Let’s say Barack is appearing on a late-night TV show. If you send it by e-mail, by the time people check their e-mail, the show could be over. Different types of announcements now warrant different types of communications.
— Scott Goodstein, Barack Obama’s text message guru talks to the Ticket
A key determinant for using any particular channel is its time cycle.
Twitter gives you a chance to push out an alert or reminder right-on-time and you can expect a significant proportion of your followers to see it within minutes.
Yes – it is about the right tool for the job.