Follow > Create > Engage

Heard of Twitter yet? Ever thought of Twitter in terms of a “communications strategy?” If not, this presentation may be for you.  It discusses twitter as a strategy for customer relations, crisis management, reputation management, event activation, promotion, issue advocacy and internal communication. It also discusses some twitter best practices and offers some links to popular twitter tools such as TweetDeck, TwitPic and TwitterGrader.  The general strategy is built around “Follow > Create > Engage.”

Here at NASA, we owe quite a bit of credit to members of the openNASA community at Ames Research Center who really were at the forefront of the twitter phenomenon at NASA. Long before Twitter itself went mainstream and before the @MarsPhoenix stream garnered 39,933 followers and ranked in the top all time twitter accounts, CoLab invited Biz Stone (@biz), and other notable leaders in the web2.0 community, to the Participatory Exploration Summit on June 26, 2007. The purpose of that summit was to engage individuals, organizations and communities with NASA and discuss how the government could benefit from collaborative technologies, such as micro-blogging. The summit proceedings are worth checking out if you haven’t had a chance; a number of great thoughts are included, such as microblogging of astronauts from the ISS, designing missions collaboratively in virtual environments, and making the volumes of data NASA has more available to the public. This summit really jump started NASA’s use of the twitter platform itself and quite a lot has happened since then. Last December, we setup the @NASA account and streamed RSS feeds from nasa.gov. Today, that account has 4,498 followers! Just this past week, PAO at NASA HQ officially took over the @NASA account and will now be using it “officially” to share the latest and greatest NASA news. Given that we were never officially representing PAO, we didn’t use twitter to respond to replies or give it any sort of personality. Now it looks like @NASA is set to really take off (the @NASA profile page already has a new look and feel).

A number of people have been talking around the agency for sometime now about a “social media” component for the overall communications strategy. We’re not quite there yet, but each day it seems we get a little closer. Awhile back I posted some thoughts on social media, why we should care, what we could use it for, etc. This post is getting a bit too long, but in a few weeks, I’ll share what I’ve been thinking about since then in terms of a “social media” for the agency, but right now I’d love to hear your thoughts on how NASA can incorporate social media into it’s communication strategy. One thing I’m particularly interested in is if anyone has heard of any more “traditional” organizations (auto companies, retailers, service providers, or even other government agencies) who have developed, and shared, a “social media strategy.” If so, post a link!

Two final thoughts.

1. If you are on twitter, and are looking to connect with other space industry people, recently Mike Fabio (@revrev), community manager at the X PRIZE foundation, wrote a popular post highlighting some well known space twitter personalities. Another meme started shortly thereafter on onorbit.com that captures even more.

2. A few fun facts:
Twitter’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds who make up 25.9% of its users. Surprised?
Twitter average daily growth rate from September to November 2008 was 5%. Impressive.