Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘bots’

Government Service Delivery via Twitter – @CBSA_BWT

Posted in government, social media, tagged , , , on 11 June 2010 |

Canada Border Services Agency is tweeting border wait times. This tweet reports that there's no delay at the Douglas (Peace Arch) border point in Surrey BC.

Well willya lookit that. The Canada Border Services Agency has set up a Twitter account that automatically broadcasts border wait times on Twitter.

So if you are sitting in your car wondering how much longer you are going to have wait to get over the border, just hand your mobile over to your passenger and tell them to look up:
http://twitter.com/cbsa_bwt

Tweets are hashtagged by the name of the border point, so searching Twitter for the appropriate hashtag for the crossing you are interested in will also turn up the info you need. Here’s an explanation of how it works from the CBSA website:
http://bit.ly/dwzprs

What I like about this is that it’s a use of Twitter for service delivery rather than marketing or promotion. In my little corner of the universe, we’re conditioned to think in terms of “getting the message out” more so than providing concrete information for our citizens to use. This Twitter account fills a basic information need without any fuss.

H/t: found via tweet from Martha, who points out that the explanation of how it all works is very well done:

@mjmclean: A very strong example of a #GoC Twitter protocol page. Nice work CBSA.
http://bit.ly/dwzprs
 #gc20 #w2p

http://twitter.com/mjmclean/status/15846259435

Read Full Post »

Breaking the #gc20 Twitterbot

Posted in social media, strategy, tactics, tagged , , , , on 25 January 2010 | 2 Comments »

Energizer bunny

It just kept going and going and going and ...

At the end of last week, I made some tweaks to the #gc20 twitterbot I built — and today, the @gc_20 account started re-tweeting the same stuff over and over. Obviously stuck in a loop of some kind.

Of course, my little bot blew up while I was attending a training session — so I was nowhere near a PC for the whole day. At break this afternoon I made a valiant attempt to kill off the account via mobile, but that didn’t work — I kept getting errors partway through the confirmation process, so I couldn’t finish the job properly.

So it just kept on keeping on – as robots will when there’s nobody around to take care of them.

I’ve now managed (I think) to turn it off. About 15 hours after it started spewing garbage. That’s a long time in a 24-7, always on, realtime world.

Takeaway: when you are experimenting in Twitter, there’s nowhere to hide when things go wrong.

So if you are doing this kind of thing while representing your org, then it’s really important to keep close tabs on your creations — especially when you change how they work. And to make a contingency plan. Neither of which I did. ‘Course I created this thing without much forethought either. It was just a little experiment in getting the hang of building a hashtag bot. Which is another no-no if you are doing this more seriously — did I mention that it’s not a good idea to be going about this without a plan?

Anyhow, credit to my network — a couple of folks tipped me off (thanks !), otherwise @gc_20 might still be re-tweeting madly. Also credit to my peeps for not chewing me out for screwing it up. Then again, maybe they’re just practicing what mama taught them — “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

Still, if I was an org, this could have been very damaging. Annoying the audience is never a good idea.

Image credit: Creativity+ on Flickr

Read Full Post »

Feeding the #GC20 Tag on Twitter

Posted in uncategorized, tagged , , , , on 27 November 2009 | 6 Comments »

GC20Last week I put together a little Twitterbot to feed the #gc20 tag. What I was trying to do with this bot was to provide a focused stream of information about the Government of Canada and Web 2.0.

I had noticed that @DBast had put together a feed on his blog, and thought — well, why not plunk that feed right into Twitter itself? So I created the @gc_20 account on Twitter, hopped over to TweetAlert, did what you are supposed to do there, and had the feed thrown together in a matter of a few minutes. I love living in the future.

Noticed afterwards that the TweetAlert service doesn’t operate in real-time, as there’s often a lag between the originating tweet and when it get’s retweeted by the @gc_20 account. There’s probably a way to reduce the lag by using a different set-up, but I do like how TweetAlert alters the tweet content slightly when it issues the retweet so that it doesn’t spam the search results or the original tweeter.

And why the hashtag #gc20? It’s been in common use for a while, and it’s specific to the Government of Canada as opposed to the more generic #gov20 hashtag. And shorter. I also like it because it’s bilingual.

So there you have it — my first experiment with a Twitterbot — so far. More tweaking to follow.

Read Full Post »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.