New Expert Labs Tool Hopes to Start Agencies Competing for Best Social Media Presence
BY Nick Judd | Friday, December 2 2011
The get-people-contributing-to-public-policy nonprofit Expert Labs has released the Federal Social Media Index, a web application that tracks how often federal agencies ask questions on Twitter — and generate meaningful response.
The index tracks 125 social media accounts belonging to federal agencies, Expert Labs founder Anil Dash explained to me today. Powered by Expert Labs' ThinkUp app for tracking Twitter questions and answers, the web application provides a weekly look at which agencies are moving past follower counts to actually engage members of the public on Twitter. Each week, the application runs through an algorithm and churns out the one agency that's doing the best job of engaging people through questions on the social networking service. (Last week it was the U.S. State Department.)
"Our very transparent motivation in this is we want agencies to compete on this," Dash said in a phone interview today, "and to see what other agencies are doing."
This isn't just a tool to encourage operating inside the same echo chamber that seems to enclose so much of American politics. While many politics and government-related conversations on Twitter are insular, a wide and growing swath of Americans use social media, Twitter included.
The brilliant part about this application is that it takes the same API that provides metrics used by other services to encourage people to plod along inside the social media hamster wheel and puts it to a constructive purpose: Encourage public agencies, through the delivering of recognition, to have two-way conversations with people. And the more people the better.