Wise Water Words - Volume 51, Issue 1 (Spring 2014)
Marketing Tip
If your utility is not yet using Twitter, it's time to give it some serious thought. There are many different ways to get the word out about utility-related news and information. In an ideal world, we would all have active websites with total reliability that could be easily updated by managers in the middle of the night. In reality, though, websites are often difficult to manage and involve contracts with third parties or careful cooperation with computer people working outside the normal utility departments.Twitter has the unique advantage among online services of being (1) easy to learn, (2) built for updates from the field, and (3) designed for brevity.
If you can send a text message, you can post a message on Twitter. Any Twitter update (or "tweet", if you prefer) is limited to 140 characters, which means you aren't expected to go on at length about anything -- just get to the point and move along. Twitter was originally intended as an alternative to sending out group text messages, so it has always been designed around phone-based access. That makes it ideal for sharing updates from the field, whether they're notes on water-main breaks, requests for conservation, or news updates from board meetings.
As an industry, if we're going to enlist the support of our customers, we need to reach out to them and be transparent about what we do to provide them with safe drinking water every day. While it is only one of many tools for doing that, Twitter is free and is the easiest to use of all.
