What is Congress Doing? Twitter!

Federal Computer Week’s Ben Bain quoted me in a story last week about an increasing number of legislators using Twitter, a social networking tool that enables people to share short, 140-character-maximum messages with each other to answer the stereotypical icebreaker question, “What are you doing?“

Click here to watch a video on Twitter in plain English.

Bain spoke to me in relation to a wiki I manage on Twitter users in the U.S. government.

He wondered what the elected men and women are doing with Twitter, given that 34 of the 540 members of the 110th Congress currently tweet.

What is Congress doing with Twitter?

Most of them are using the microblogging service to interact with constituents (and other global citizens with a Twitter account) about any issue. Many, if not all, of the Twitter feeds are monitored by staffers in case a legislative question arises or to follow-up with specific answers in case the legislator is unaware.

If you are reading this sentence and never heard of Twitter, you’re not alone. But you will, as sure as you’ve heard of eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook.

Twitter currently serves about 2 million worldwide internet users, which may seem shrimpy compared to the hundreds of millions on Facebook, but Twitter traffic increased 600% in the past year!

The statistics are more impressive when you consider global studies indicate business success is dependent on word-of-mouth viral marketing via the internet!

Twitter is not the end-all solution to microblogs; but it is the most popular. The fastest-growing segment of mass public media includes the Chinese komoo.cn, Indian snockles.com, Italian meemi.com, Japanese feecle.jp, Czech drbz.cz, and many more. Here is a growing list of global microblogs.

Five months after Twitter’s launch in October 2006, Delaware Senator Joseph Biden sent his first tweet in March 2007, followed two months later by his Illinois colleague, Senator Barack Obama, who’s used it mainly for broadcasting messages to over 50,000 followers. By the end of 2007, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd joined the bandwagon.

Other legislators were also early adopters of Twitter, such as John Edwards and Tom DeLay, but everything changed last month.

You may recall reading my support of Congressman Michael Capuano and his quest, as chairman of the Franking Commission to urge web reform by preventing the Congress from embedding YouTube videos on the house.gov server.

But, like the CNN story five days later, if the House Administration Committee (and/or its Senate equal) bans Congress from using external video sharing services, what’s next? With the explosion of internet services, who can accurately predict Twitter won’t be next on the chopping block?

That’s why folks like Senator Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) went public with Twitter feeds in June concurrent to the Franking Commission debate.

So to naysayers like Vince Leibowitz of Capitol Annex who ask whether the media’s fascination with Culberson is warranted, why doesn’t Leibowitz talk about the Franking report? Because that was a direct cause for the “Let Our Congress Tweet” campaign.

And why doesn’t Leibowitz admit that Culberson, much more than Obama and others he mention, use Twitter not for broadcasting messages (which his staff does via emails and press releases) but for one-on-one messaging, enabling voters to engage with their elected officials?

Obama’s feed does not include personalized responses, begging the question why he has a Twitter account in the first place that can’t be accomplished with electronic and direct mail?

If Twitter is not a transparent example of elected leaders telling “we the people” what they are doing, then tell me what is.

For more information on the individual members of Congress using Twitter, visit Congresspedia, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy.

Let’s converse. I challenge you to contact me on Twitter, send me an e-mail, and/or post a comment below.

• Do you use Twitter?
• Even if you’ve never heard of it or don’t understand its purpose, wouldn’t you favor any way possible to enable quick-fire dialogue with your elected leaders?
• If not, why not?

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Tagged as: Government, Twitter

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