As individuals, we look up to well-known people, historical figures and possibly even our close family members to shape our lives based on experiences.

As institutions/organizations/government we look to other organizations for best practices. That said, for the next coming weeks. I’ll be writing about social media best practices of big companies from around the world so we in government can take some good tips and examples to learn from.

So this week, we’re going to look at Verizon Communications Social Media Strategy.

About Verizon

Verizon Communications Inc. (Verizon) is a provider of communications services. Verizon operates in two segments: Domestic Wireless and Wireline. Its Domestic Wireless’s products and services include wireless voice and data services and equipment sales across the United States. Wireline’s communications products and services include voice, Internet access, broadband video and data, next generation Internet protocol (IP) network services, network access, long distance and other services. It provides these products and services to consumers in the United States, as well as to carriers, businesses and government customers both in the United States and in 150 other countries worldwide. On January 9, 2009, the Company acquired Alltel Corporation (Alltel). In July 2010, Frontier Communications Corp acquired New Communications Holdings Inc., Verizon Communications Inc.’s local wireline operations in 14 states.

How to Avoid an Epic Failure

Verizon social media strategy objectives

Verizon’s social media objectives (High level)

1. Build brand equity – One of the things that Verizon wants to achieve is to have an authentic voice of Verizon consistently across all social media properties (social media channels are called social media properties by Verizon).  So the social media experience is communicated through social media platforms and community forums.  They measure this by metrics on brand awareness, reputation and positive sentiment.
2. Grow sales and revenue from social media audience – This is an aspirational goal for Verizon. They find building the brand, communication and engagement comes first and being able to demonstrate sales and ROI is something that they expect to see grow from that interaction. Verizon measures this with increased sales and revenue from its social media audience.
3. Provide online customer support through social media – Verizon provided customer support through social media by listening and monitoring social media sites/forums for questions, issues and complaints. They then engaged and responded to customer questions and issues to build brand loyalty. Once that is done, they measured the results by call deflection, churn and customer sentiment.

Challenges for social media objectives from a customer service point of view

Challenges

One of the challenges of this particular objective is as a large organization that has large customer bases, large support organizations that exist already, you will have that customer interaction down to science. i.e. How long does it take for a call to come it? How long is your average talk time is? You know exactly how much it costs to serve a customer. And when you look into a medium like social media is what you find out is its not more efficient to use social media from a customer service perspective as of now.

Evolution of Verizon’s Social Media Practices

Evolution of Verizon social media practices

• At first Verizon, like any other organization had random disparate groups getting involved with social media. For example you get one bright person in one region saying “Hey let’s do a Twitter promotion!”
• And this type of thing started to crop up more and more. After some time Verizon realized that they’ve got a lot of disparate social media properties out there they weren’t sure whether this was Verizon or just its just somebody who’s not authorized to do this or what?
• So there was disparate groups of social media properties and people were starting to ask “Well which one of these 35 Twitter accounts are the ones I should be picking/following?”
• So Verizon decided we need to have a strong centralized effort to make some sense from a strategy perspective and from a brand voice perspective.
• So Verizon created a social media steering council and a social media working team. And this included people form Verizon Business, Verizon Wireless and FiOS organization – the telecommunications side. It wasn’t easy for Verizon to get an across company task force charter. But they did it! They had executive mandate and that helped it to get going.
• Some of the things the task force accomplished on doing were approving the social media properties i.e. if you wanted to put the title or logo of the facebook page or twitter, you needed to go through the right steps to make sure it made sense for the business and that you had the resource to support it on an ongoing basis because the last thing you want to do is throw out a social media property and abandoned it because it can look like abandoned real estate.
• Verizon then developed a social media guideline and did a lot of training with social media practitioners and also made that training possible for regular employees that are interested in social media as well. And it relates a lot to the companies code of conduct.
• They did have some people come up to them and say “Is it really necessary to have social media guidelines when its all basic stuff?” Like “Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal.” But Verizon found that their employees who were active in social media said that they do in fact need guidelines. They said they need to know specifically that if they retweet something that is a rumour, am I telling a lie? Well, the fact is, yes you could be. So it was important for Verizon to think how well this applied to social media and why guidelines and training was so important to Verizon.
• The steering council had the role of being the forum on an ongoing basis for sharing strategies and best practices and also ongoing success metrics development.

One of the mistakes Verizon made in their social media journey

Tiny Epic Fail

They wanted to have one unified Facebook page. The idea was you’re on the internet available all around the world, so let’s have a unified presence, which to be fair is a fair assessment. One thing that they originally had earlier was a regional FiOS page which was very very successful. But it was for FiOS in the North East and people would go on there and say “When are you going to have FiOS in Arizona?” and they’d respond back saying something along the lines that they are FiOS of the North East and couldn’t quite answer that or had the authority to respond on that matter.

So people didn’t view it as a regional page but a neutral one.  And that’s what drove them to create a Verizon general page, so whatever you want, bring it to this one spot and we’ll answer or share it etc. So they launched the page, had many followers, then Verizon looked at who was attracted to it. And they found out that 90% people who signed up and 90% of the discussion was all about Verizon Wireless. So it was their intention to make it an all Verizon page but it ended up being a Verizon Wireless page.

So the moral of the story is, you don’t really get to decide what your social media property is. The customers are going to do that for you. And you don’t really get to decide what the content is, their going to drive that as well.  So Verizon quickly realized that it didn’t do what they had originally intended for it to do. And on top of that it was difficult to manage because from a customer service perspective, if say 90% of the work belongs to this division, how are you going to alternate who handles every tweet or every status update. So that kind of got problematic for Verizon, so they went back to the drawing board and realized that their social media virtual online properties need to mirror their virtual reality.

What Verizon did after their tiny Epic Fail…

After tiny epic fail

After going back to the drawing board, Verizon came up with new strategies, they looked at what they need to achieve with Facebook. Verizon Wireless had the need for cool stuff because they had applications they needed to share and download. Their telecom bit was all about high speed TV and they were very regionally orientated, so they needed the ability to add tabs, plus they had a lot of customer support that they wanted to achieve through their Facebook page. And on the Verizon Business side, a lot of content, a lot of white papers and a lot of techy geeky talk that Verizon needed to share with their customers.

The Facebook pages for Verizon

• Focus on customer service.
• They had 9 people who ended up providing support via that Facebook page.
• They had a separate tab that focused specifically on customer support so that help the wall content to be a little bit general, tv content and promotional orientated. Although its important to remember that customers go where customers want to go and you really can’t control that but you can gently guide them and nudge them in a certain direction.

The Twitter accounts for Verizon

• Verizon quickly realized that Twitter is used for a more specific purpose and it would be a mistake to put all on one twitter account, like what happened to their Facebook page.
• Twitter by definition is very well-suited for specific audiences and even specific promotions or trade show events.
• On the FiOS side, they had 3 main pages that they focused on:-
• (i) FiOS fans, that talks about new content like ESPN and football.
• (ii) FiOSTV, that is run by a geeky guy and talks about things in depth and he actually once tweeted that he’s going on vacation. Verizon found that when this happened, they realized that when they had gone to the effort to personalise a social media property, and this is this person and this is what they’re doing, they’re answering your questions, users have some tolerance for the fact that you’re not going to be there all the time.
• (iii) Verizon Wireless (has 4 different twitter properties), and here they have come away from the Verizon uniform branding approach in efforts to stay alive, it needs to change over time.

Verizon’s Business-to-Business (B2B) Approach

Verizon Blog

B2B requires a different approach. Verizon is very blog focused, they’ve got a lot of content to get out. So they have this policy blog which is really more corporate, great way to get out the story about Google and Verizon and the news and frameworks that are happening. Verizon also used it as a way to refute any false claims and rumours that happened the last week and so forth.

On the business side, Verizon has 2 main blogs.

• One is a security blog = More text orientated
• One is more general = More graphic orientated

The one does better on readership, hits and engagement = The security blog

The Verizon Security Blog

Its very limited, all about security, for those who are interested in that narrow topic. They only have four writers, so they’ve developed a fan base.

The Verizon General Blog

Its open to a variety of discussions including games, data centres, unified communications and etc. But because the topics were so broad, nobody really wanted to get updates all the time. Plus Verizon had about 14 different writers for this and people never really developed their favourites.

Verizon’s lessons learned from blogging – The Killer

Verizon had developed a very cool art work where figures were filmed in great high-definition and when you went to the page, you can see them and they moved around and talked. So they put out a new blog post and people would click on it on Twitter and then they’d get this fancy artwork and within half a second they were out again. It was keeping readers from getting to the content. So lesson learnt here, don’t try to be fancy on blogs. Its the content that matters!

New Content Drives Engagement in B2B

New blog content

In July 2010, Verizon rolled out a Data Breach Investigation Report, which is something they have been doing for the past couple of years. It has all the security breaches that Verizon investigates and comes up with some conclusions and analysis. They used this and promoted in on Facebook, Twitter and several blog articles that are developed on it and when they sent this out, Verizon saw a huge spike in reader visits to the blog because of the new content.

So moral of the story, a great way to engage with B2B audience is to drive new content and it can be somewhat manufactured. It doesn’t have to be a product and it doesn’t have to be a piece of news.

The Ambassador Team Pilot

Ambassador Team Pilot

Verizon had a team of people who said they that they’re job is not social media but we’re really into it and we would like to help Verizon to get its company message out a little bit.

Verizon’s intitally had a lot of concerns about this like “You’re not really in the PR or marketing department, so how can we trust you to say the right thing?”

The other concerns were, “Won’t people mistake you for representing the company?” ,”Wow, you’re going to spending all your time doing this, how are you going to do your day job?”

So if you want to try something that’s a little bit risky, call it a test or a pilot, give executives management visibility of what you’re doing and do a thorough job training. So Verizon had 24 people who were called from across the organization in different areas to do this pilot.

Benefits from the Ambassador Team Pilot programme

• Employees got closer to the company.
• They identified with it, they learned more about other business units better and they increased their knowledge base.
• They learned to grow bigger ears. So there was real value in engaged employees hearing about something that they knew about because they were in one business unit and then maybe doing an executive escalation to another business unit where the problem had occurred. Where those connections would’ve probably not been made if those people were working just part of their day job.
• The rogue employee issue, never materialised. Verizon never had a problem with an employee saying something that they shouldn’t have.
• Lessons learnt: Don’t expect to get significant results if you don’t put forth significant efforts. So if you’re thinking of taking employee engagement and build that into the marketing plan? Well Verizon says not if you’re going to do it with a small group. You need to do it company wide like Zappos.

Conclusion

Verizon social media strategy conclusion

• Customers ultimately define the social media property as Verizon learnt from the Facebook Page experience.
• Customers choose what content they want to consume. Verizon doesn’t own the message.
• Customers also drive the customer support and mechanism, even though we didn’t want to provide customer service via social media because it wasn’t as effective (scientific speaking) but Verizon had to provide it in the end because it was a customer expectation.
• Verizon can’t be solely driven by metrics like efficiency.
• In social media you need to hypothesize, control your experiment, test and repeat.

Hope you find this useful.

@Liz_Azyan xxx

http://www.facebook.com/LGEOResearch

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Hadley focuses on collaborative technologies, helping people to work together when they are not in the same place.  She has worked in many parts of the public sector, most recently in the NHS designing and launching http://www.synapse.nhs.uk for doctors in training.  Her local government career has included managing the team behind the development of the IDeA’s communities of practice platform (http://communities.idea.gov.uk).

You can also find Hadley at http://hadleybeeman.net, which is coming soon!

My interview with Hadley on Collaborative Learning (30.08.09)

Liz interviews Hadley Beeman on Collaborative Learning

Here’s a breakdown/transcript of what I discuss with Hadley in this interview.

Download Transcript

Diving into the Learning Pool…

http://www.learningpool.com

So now that you know what collaborative learning is, after listening or reading my interview with Hadley, you might be interested to listen to my interviews with Learning Pool’s “Customer of the Year Award Winners in 2009″ to get a more practical and better understanding of the effects of collaborative learning from a community or users point of view. I worked with LP earlier this year and was thoroughly impressed with how highly LP’s customers spoke about LP.  You can check out my earlier posts on Learning Pool below:

Learning Pool at ScotWeb2 2009 on Collaborative Learning and Saving Money

Public Sector Learning Conference – Fresh idea’s for tomorrow’s people

Blend it!: LearningPool’s Public Sector Learning Conference Successful Blended Approach

LearningPool Winners Videos at Public Sector Learning Conference 2009!

So I’ve asked Mary McKenna who is the MD of Learning Pool and see if there was any way I could help publicize their services to my readers. Kindly enough, LP has commissioned me to do this piece for them, which certainly helps me as a struggling student  I do believe in what LP has to offer and hope that more people will be aware of the fantastic products and services that LP offer local authorities in terms of encouraging collaborative learning within and beyond their organizations. Click on the audios below to listen to these special feature interviews.

All interviews are slightly different from each other depending on each of their personal experiences but some of the basic questions asked are displayed below:

How would you describe your experience using Learningpool as a whole?

How would you describe LearningPool’s course design authoring tool?

Do you have any specific example’s of cost or time savings when using LearningPool’s services?

What are the major benefits, in your opinion, of using e-learning compared to class-based learning?

What are your thoughts on LearningPool’s customer service and what is their usual turnaround?

Would you say LearningPool has encourage collaborative learning in your council?

What would you say are the best features of LearningPool in your experience?

Here is a special featured interview with the overall winner of Learning Pool’s Customer of the Year Award.

Separate blogpost: Christine Shakespeare – Basildon District Council

Best Learning Pool Community Member of 2009 – Ian Leggitt (Bury Metropolitan Borough Council)

This interview features Ian Leggitt (Organisational Development Officer) from Bury Metropolitan Borough Council who earlier this year won the Best Learning Pool Community Member Award. I did do a video interview with him back then which you can view below.

I recently caught up with Ian again to catch up on more details of his experience using collaborative learning tools and Learning Pool e-Learning modules. You can listen to the interview here.

Liz interviews Ian Leggitt Best LP Community Member of 2009

Highlights from this interview:

Working with Learning Pool to develop the DLE system and suggesting improvements that was later evaluated by LP for the wider community.

Working to create a best practice formula for deploying the learning material.

Use the DLE to offer online materials that supplement our existing web courses.

Pre-learning and fast track option through the DLE.

Time and cost savings examples

Use of tutor-facilitated e-learning

Responses to sharing using LP’s e-learning modules and overlaps of courses between local authorities

Comparison between off-the-shelf e-learning solutions and Learning Pool unique and dynamic offerings

Open source principle = Learning Pool’s DLE principle

Collaborative approach and channels discussed as a viable way moving corporate training to online delivery.

Previous experience with other generic e-learning solutions

Where does Learning Pool stand in the current market?

Best Learning Pool Ambassador of 2009: Simon Green (Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council)

I’ve never actually managed to meet Simon in person as he was absent from the conference and award ceremony earlier this year but I did manage to interview him over the phone a couple of weeks ago and talk a little bit about his experience with collaborative learning and Learning Pool as a whole.

Liz interviews Simon Green Best LP Ambassador of 2009

Highlights from this interview:

Learning Pool e-learning modules adds value to staff development and improving services.

Reaction from users using the e-learning modules. These include the recruitment selection programme, performance coaching scheme and leadership programme.

Its not only for training development, its also there for reference and quality delivery.

Examples of interactive tools used.

Explanation of the “blended approach”.

Overview of the online assessment offered by Learning Pool using the blended approach.

Good practices.

Flexibility of the DLE system.

Time and cost savings using Learning Pool e-Learning module.

Adaptation/Repurposing e-Learning modules example.

Trained 1500 users in just 3 weeks!

Description of Learning Pool’s course design authoring tool.

Thoughts on Learning Pool’s customer service and turn around.

Updates on the DLE system.

Blaenau Gwent saves cash by moving into e-learning

Simon talks about other e-learning companies and compares them to Learning Pool

Jean Tracey replacing Steve Day (Rotherham MBC) – Best Learning Pool Ambassador 2009

Liz interviews Jean Tracey

Highlights from this interview:

Description on LP course design authoring tool

Example of using videos for the e-learning modules

Time and cost savings using LP

Rotherham MBC trains 1,500 staff on Safeguarding Adults

Availability of courses on demand increases effectiveness and efficiency of council staff

Flexibility of LP – accessing the course at home and over the weekend

LP’s customer service and turn around

Encouraging collaborative learning with other local authorities

Comparison of how long it would take to deliver a course without LP e-learning modules

Repurposing e-learning modules

Example and explanation of favourite feature – quizzes

Anti-money laundering and terrorists modules for future modules

Why Rotherham MBC chose LP

Interview with Steve Day earlier this year

One more featured interview to come! A PDF format of this piece will be available soon. Please check back for this.

Let’s Party like there’s no tomorrow!

Also don’t forget to come and join Learning Pool’s Party this month. Here are the details. I’ll be there too, so don’t forget to say hello. I’ll be the one who looks like someone who’s never been on a boat party! LOL

Venue:    HMS President, Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0HJ 
Tel:         0207 583 1918
Date:      Wed 23 September, from 2pm till late (oh yes)
RSVP:     book your places here

Hope this was useful!

Liz xxx

Possibly Related Posts

• Special Feature: Liz meets Christine Shakespeare, Winner of Learning Pool’s overall Customer of the Year Award 2009
• Attention London Boroughs!: I’m becoming a CELEB for a day onboard the HMS President!
• Local Gov 2.0 Strategies: Tackling current issues like the swine flu through collaborative learning
• Learning Pool at ScotWeb2 2009 on Collaborative Learning and Saving Money
• The Social Media Challenges within UK Local Government

Today I made the wrong decision to stay away from Twitter to concentrate on some thesis writing.  However thanks to @TimCooperUK, I’ve been alerted on a recent activity on twitter that has been creating quite a lot of buzz if you search the hashtag #amazonfail. So I’ve decided to update an article I wrote recently regarding “People Power on Twitter” for the Moldova protest. You can find the original post below.

Apparently, Amazon is deleting the rankings (de-rank) of LBGT and erotica books. Though this has possibly just caught on fire today, this has been going on since February. The response the authors affected got from Amazon was this

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Some people are already closing their Amazon accounts and threatening to stop buying from Amazon.  I’ve never seen hashtag updated so fast! I’m beginning to wonder if Twitter will crash because of it! They’ve even already managed to make a logo out of it! That was quick!

Though what will be more interesting to see is what will happen tomorrow? What type of impact, action, maybe backtrack (like Facebook case) or PR response will come from Amazon. Will we see a 24 hour turnaround in response to Twitter “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action”? Will customer voices on Twitter be heard loud and clear? Will Twitterers #amazonfail come together to launch a petition to demand Amazon to get their act together (Just updated – here it is http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy? Are we going to see a Facebook Group created to boycott Amazon until they change their ways (spoke to soon – its here http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=70927484220)?

Here’s a snapshot of #amazonfail

Here’s a video on Youtube that popped out around an hour ago

The great thing about all this is… I’m sure I’ll find out in REAL-TIME what the outcome will be. I don’t have to wait for the news to come on, or a newspaper website to publish it, or even someone to blog about it. All I need to do is check #amazonfail on Twitter or even better yet, I’m sure one of my friends on Twitter will tweet it or RT it to me. Let’s see what “Collective Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA) on Twitter will result in this time.

Here are some links talking in more details about #amazonfail

1. #Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyberactivism
2. An open letter to Jeff Bezos
3. Amazon Rank
4. Amazon Follies
5. GoogleBomb AmazonFail
6. Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?
7. Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings

Original post:
There’s so much going around Twitter these days, its quite hard to keep up with its news and progress. We hear Twitter being mentioned everyday now and it might be a surprise to some people that those news headlines regarding Twitter are no longer confined to “What are you doing?” chit chats or the newest celebrity using twitter.

Just take an example of what is currently happening in the Moldova protest. People are “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA), which is from where I stand, is the true value of Twitter. Some people have called it the “Twitter Revolution” because of Twitters ability to report real-time events in a simplistic micro-blogging method of tagging each conversation with #pman. The #pman hashtag is then picked up by twitter’s search results at search.twitter.com . Then through these tags, more links and social media channels can be shared to update #pman with Flickr pics or Facebook group links and other social/new media and mobile applications.

I feel Flickr and other photographic new media outlets are also very powerful in this protest because everyone knows that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  And not to be outdone, YouTube ,Vimeo and embedded videos from various news and other websites can also play an important part of social media if something significant happens like the incident where a man died at the G20 protest in London (link to YouTube video).

Here is an interview with an internet expert for global politics (Evgeny Morozov) talking about just how much of a factor is Twitter in the Moldova protest.

Moldova Twitter Revolution

So there could be a 1,000,001 reasons for governments, organizations or individuals to ignore or resist social media, however there are also 1,000,001 reasons to join the Twitter Revolution of  “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA).

Other posts

• Now with pictures & other Twitterati lists!: @Liz_Azyan’s Twitterati Dedication List – People you should follow on Twitter
• List and status of UK Local Council Twitters
• List of UK Local Councils on YouTube as of 22nd July 2009
• Updated list of UK Local Councils Twitter Accounts – 22nd July 2009
• Government-to-Citizen Communications: Utilising multiple digital channels effectively

Twitterplan – Pezholio

You can also visit Stuart Harrison’s website here to find out more about Twitterplan.

Follow Stuart on Twitter at @pezholio

Here is a snipet of Twitterplan introduction on Lichfield District Councils website.

Get local planning applications via Twitter

If you’re one of the many people who use social networking site Twitter and would like to receive alerts of planning applications in your area, then you’ll love Twitterplan.

Twitterplan is a new site set up by Lichfield District Council (with a little help from City of Lincoln Council and Planning Alerts) that sends a message to Twitter users whenever a planning application is submitted in their area.

It’s simple to sign up to, simply visit the Twitterplan website, enter your Twitter username and postcode, and follow the onscreen instructions.

If you don’t use Twitter, or would prefer to get alerts via email, then you can get alerts by signing up on the Planning Alerts website.

This service covers 324 local authorities, including Lichfield, so spread the word!

Warwickshire’s R&D website

Just in case you wondering who else is working on some exciting mashups, have a look at Warwickshire Councils R&D website. They’re working on some interesting projects with me in the near future. You could find their Web Services and API Dump here. Look out for a post featuring their projects here on LGEOResearch soon.

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• @72prufrocks, @Pezholio & @ArunMarsh Reflect on the Digital Engagement Event on 6th October 2009
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• Interview with Lichfield Dictrict Council on Twitter Usage
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Play this podcast to listen to Liz’s summary of this post.

Liz Azyan

This video feature Chris Pirillo, talking about TweetCongress.org in America, which is TweetMinster.co.uk. An overview about government officials on twitter and the reactions.

following my local council on twitter. yeah. on 12seconds.tv

Catch Simon Wakeman’s radio interview about Medway Council’s Twitter here (opens new page) - http://www.simonwakeman.com/2009/03/24/radio-interviews-on-council-twitter/

Reaction from a hyperlocal website – HarringayOnline via @hughflouch

Reply to this comment

NewcastleCC’s reaction examples via @alncl

• Conversation 1

Customer: “I am wondering why Newcastle City Council is following me. Is this a type of Big Brother surveillance?”
NewcastleCC: “Wouldn’t be very subtle if it was! No, we’re following Twitterers in and around Newcastle to join in the conversation.”

• Conversation 2

Customer: “Newcastle City Council (@NewcastleCC) just added me on Twitter. Great to see authorities communicating with people using new technologies ”

• Conversation 3

CustomerA: “Just got a Follower request from @NewcastleCC”
CustomerB: “RT @CustomerA “Just got a Follower request from @NewcastleCC” Yes, me too! I wonder why?”
NewcastleCC: “@CustomerB @CustomerA Because we’re interested in what people in Newcastle have to say.”
CustomerA: “@NewcastleCC I didn’t see it as a negative, quite the opposite! It’s great that you’re using social media….what would you like to know? ”
CustomerC: White“@CustomerB @CustomerA Don’t worry, it’s harmless. Been following @NewcastleCC myself for a little while now. No anti-free speech talk yet. ”

CustomerD: “@NewcastleCC Maybe they think it stands for Newcastle Credit Card, and not City Council?”
CustomerA: “@CustomerC @CustomerB I think it’s great that they’re using Twitter, cheers for the heads up! ”

• Conversation 4

CustomerE: “NewcastleCityCouncil is now following me?! Why?!!”
NewcastleCC: “@CustomerE We follow other journalists too!”
CustomerE: “@NewcastleCC ha… thanks for replying! should probably tell you that I’ve never been further north than Leicester…”
CustomerF: “@CustomerE time you got out more then! Come to #thinkingdigital”

NewcastleCC: “@CustomerE I agree with @CustomerF on this one!”
CustomerE: “@NewcastleCC @CustomerF I doubt I’ll find the cash for #thinkingdigital but a road trip to Newcastle is now in the planning stage!”
CustomerF: “@CustomerE you could always try and blag a press freebie from Herb. Or make it a promo visit for Wired UK – have a stand!”

NewcastleCC: ”@CustomerE Excellent”

Here is a example of a David Cameron answering a question from twitter through youtube.

 

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