Greenversations

Last fall, I wrote about this blog’s Twitter account, @greenversations. Since then, several folks across EPA have been trying out Twitter, with varying approaches.  Today, I got this question from Randa Williams, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s looking into best practices for businesses on Twitter:

I wonder when you will start having conversations rather than just broadcasting on twitter…Lots of EPA broadcast channels on Twitter, exceptionally few conversations. I know, engagement is more work, wondering if you had thought about expanding into this area.

It was such a good question, I thought I’d respond publicly as well as emailing her.

Randa is right: the gold standard is conversing on Twitter and other social media sites, not just broadcasting. But she’s also right that it takes resources.  Not just someone’s time, but also having the right person, who’s plugged into what’s going on around EPA and who knows how to speak to the world on EPA’s behalf.

There are also different ways to use Twitter, and we’re experimenting with most of them.  For example, we’ve done a little live tweeting, with plans to do more.  There are also different approaches to who to follow, how frequently we can commit to posting, etc.

We do have a couple of good examples of interaction for content on a smaller scale than “all of EPA:”

• @EPAregion9 - Wendy Chavez in our San Francisco office.  I think Wendy is our best tweeter at the moment.
• @EPAespanol - Lina Younes at headquarters.  Lina leads our multilingual communications task force (have you seen all the languages in the upper right corner of our home page?), and she tweets in Spanish.

While we figure out the gold standard (interaction), we’re doing what we can on what I call the tin standard (broadcasting). Given the number of followers, it seems a decent number of people appreciate even that.  Here are some of our other accounts:

• @EPAgov - our main account.  Primarily our automated news release headlines and blog posts, plus a few web updates and manual tweets.  This account combines content that’s also split into individual accounts, and is also available on normal Web pages:
  • @EPAnews - news releases (same info as shown in our newsroom)
  • @greenversations - blog (same as the blog itself)
  • @EPAweb - updates to epa.gov (same info as shown on our recent additions page)
• @EPAlive - we’re occasionally experimenting with using this for live tweeting
• @EPAowow - Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds
• @EPAairmarkets - market-based regulatory programs to improve U.S. air quality
• @EPAregion2 - regional office in New York
• @EPAregion3 - regional office in Philadelphia

We’re also working up some conventions, like starting our account names with “usepa” and using the same seal as the avatar.

Not quite in the same category, some of us are also tweeting professionally. We’re not “representing” EPA per se, but we’re using it as a professional network and information source.  For example:

• @levyj413 - this is my Twitter account, and I use it to discuss social media in government (especially EPA)
• @suzack777 - this is Suzanne Ackerman on our web team.  Suzanne uses Twitter to research projects like blogger outreach, and uses Twitter to make contacts and discuss related issues.

So thanks, Randa, for reminding me that we need to communicate more about what we’re up to.  Stay tuned for updates about our other social media efforts, too (in the meantime, join us on Facebook!).

Jeffrey Levy is EPA’s Director of Web Communications.

About the author: Jeffrey Levy joined EPA in 1993 to help protect the ozone layer. He is now the National Web Content Manager.

Two weeks ago I wrote that we’d hit 300 people following us on Twitter. I invited them to mention us, to see whether our follower count would jump, and promised a follow-up.

Only one person did tweet us, as far as I could find on Twitter search. Thanks, wingy22!

Yet in the past two weeks, we’ve picked up another 100 followers. Six months from 0-300, two weeks from 300-400. Errr … 401 … 402 … umm … wait a sec … 403 … make that 408. Anyway, @wormlady was #400. I put her name in the title because that’s about all that actually shows up in Twitter’s 140-character posts, so I’m hoping she’ll notice her name the next time she logs in.

Anyway, the sudden jump amazes me. Was it as simple as noting we’re on Twitter in a post, as opposed to just having the link on the right?

Let’s try the same thing on Facebook and MySpace. We’re not doing much there yet, but we have big plans, and knowing there’s interest helps. If you want to know when we do get going, become our fan on Facebook and MySpace.

How to engage the most people isn’t an idle question. The first time, for example, that we take comments on a regulation via social media, we’ll want to get the biggest bang for the least effort (efficient use of your tax dollars, doncha know).

What do you suggest?

About the author: Jeffrey Levy joined EPA in 1993 to help protect the ozone layer. He is now the National Web Content Manager.

Ever notice that link on the right of our blog pages that says “Follow us on Twitter?” Twitter.com lets people get short, real-time updates from other people who are also on Twitter (it’s called “microblogging,” and there are other sites besides Twitter). Most of it is friends chatting or colleagues sharing tips. And that seems to be the best possible use for microblogging.

But another way to use it is to post your headlines. It’s like RSS plus: no feed reader needed and you get everyone’s feeds in one window.

Our friends at usa.gov put post titles from their blog, GovGab. on Twitter a few months ago using their RSS feed. It took them only a few minutes to set up, and then it ran by itself. That seemed like an easy way to check out this system, and it’s free, so Greenversations has been on Twitter ever since. And boy, were we surprised at what happened.

With no advertising, 25 people started following us, making us wonder what would happen if we made it easier. So we added the link on the right. On Wed., the 300th Twitterer started following us: @thegreenscene. And a few more pile on each day. With that success, we decided to try our news release headlines on Twitter, too.

This is a great example of using a Web 2.0 tool to put information where the people are, instead of making them come to us (speaking of which, have you seen our Question of the Week widget?). As of today, most of our blog’s traffic is people reading on this site. But between Twitter and our RSS feed, I think that will change.

Changing gears a bit, I’d like your help if you’re a Twitterer. You all have people following you, and some of you have hundreds or even thousands. Let’s try an experiment, to see whether people who already follow us influence people following them. If you’d like to help:

1. Please tweet us (post on Twitter). It could be as simple as “Check out EPA’s blog on Twitter: @greenversations” or “EPA’s tweeting its news releases: @usepanews”
2. Leave a comment here introducing yourself.

And whether you’re on Twitter or not, tell us how you use Web 2.0 to stay in touch with what’s going on with EPA, this blog, and environmental protection in general.

I’ll be checking our numbers and will report back with what happens.

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.

About the Author: Melissa-Anley Mills is the news director for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. She joined the Agency in 1998 as a National Urban Fellow.

Usually I sit in a Dilbert-style cube-farm, a warm, calm, enveloping sea of beige, beige, and more beige. So it was a rare and truly delicious treat to be invited to tag along on a field visit. The mission was simple: help Dr. Montira Pongsiri communicate her biodiversity research examining the link between biodiversity, the abundance and composition of animals, and Lyme Disease risk. To do this, my colleague, Aaron Ferster, (who previously blogged about our trip) and I had to see the researchers in action. We wanted to bring this experience to others via the web, so we loaded up on the technologies that would help us do that, a blackberry for “microblogging” (or “tweeting” on Twitter), and still and video cameras.

This turned into an experiment for the communication crew – the first time someone had microblogged live to the EPA’s Twitter account from the field. The first challenge we encountered was, of course, technical: spotty cell phone service. Recording the time and saving tweets in draft mode until reaching cell coverage solved that. But the real challenge was keeping the tweets short and sweet. Twitter has a limit of 140 characters (including spaces!) for posts. But there was so much to say about what we were seeing: white-footed mice, voles, baby opossums, catbirds, warblers, thrushes and ticks, oh my!

So there we were in the forest, watching and learning, tapping away on the blackberry, capturing video and photos, and lending a hand to the researchers. You can see the fruit of this labor on EPA’s biodiversity web page. Here you can read the tweets, and see the slideshows. Soon we’ll post video clips, so stay tuned.

Let us know what you think, suggestions are welcomed. What you would like to see in future “Field Notes” or visits with researchers?

Hopefully, through the images you’ll get a taste of this exciting research. Maybe it will encourage you to consider an environmental career as a field researcher, maybe a science teacher could use this as a teaching module, but I hope one thing is clear to see, the passion and devotion that these researchers have to gather the scientific data necessary to protect the environment and public health