If you don’t already know, the GC Entrepreneur cohort has a Twitter account. You should follow us. We have about 300 followers, which I suppose isn’t a terribly impressive number, but — let’s be honest — it’s really not the size of the following but how you use it that matters.
So why do we use Twitter? To engage our stakeholders. But actually, it’s a mighty fine communication tool that’s open to all, good for both uni- and multi-directional engagement, and has the benefit for seeming pretty modern. Plus, it’s a good way for me — one of the two resident @GC_Entrepreneur tweeters, alongside Laura Portal Avelar — to justify the unhealthy amount of time I would spend on Twitter anyways.
In the spirit of documenting how the GCEs came to have a Twitter account, below are seven crucial choices we made to go from zéro à héro on Twitter. And there’s lot of good hyperlinks embedded throughout to keep the more mentally mercurial amongst you entertained.
Choice one: principles. This is a jargony way of asking a simple question: what would our rules be on social media, irrespective of platform? Cedric drafted guiding principles on Sharepoint, on which we all commented and added and subtracted until we came up with 12 principles. In hindsight, this went unusually well for a group of type As that can barely agree on a place to eat for lunch.
Choice two: platform. It seemed to be a given that the GCEs would have social media, but there was a fairly thorough discussion about where we should focus our efforts. We used our #socialmedia channel in Slack to debate the relative merits of LinkedIn as a blogging platform (no consensus), to deliberate on using any of the GoC tools (merci, mais non merci), and to agree that Twitter was a “no brainer.” I agreed, in my typically coarse manner.
Choice three: strategy. Using our guiding principles that we would each have our own voice, we decided that that the GCEs should continue to generate content on their own personal Twitter accounts — follow each one of them here! — with a central account amplifying their voices or tweeting its own content when a group of us is together.
Choice four: handle and hashtag. We bungled this one. We started with just a hashtag and not a handle: it was #gcentrepreneur, which we shared with our mates on the Gold Coast. Unfortunately, a few days later, we discovered that the corresponding @gcentrepreneur handle was taken. (Terriak untuk to Jakarta’s very own.) So we abandoned our first hashtag, and came back from the drawing board with a new underscore in our name. In doing that, we created a bit of confusion among our audience which is the kind of inconsistency that can kill a brand.
Choice five: #newprofilepic. GC Entrepreneur needed to be an innovation thirst trap, which means we couldn’t be a faceless account. Our resident biologist-cum-graphic-designer Mike mocked up some logos and we used Slack’s great voting feature to choose the one we liked best. This was another choice that, considering our groups general strong-mindedness, went smoothly.
Choice six: voice. Since Laura and I volunteered to do the tweets from the GC_Entrepeneur account (hmm), the other GCEs put their trust in us that we wouldn’t tweet anything too embarrassing. My own feeling was that many of the other government+innovation accounts out there — with all the respect due to them and their much-larger followings — all had the same voice: unflaggingly positive, a bit stilted, and intent on pushing messages without being very responsive. So in the spirit of being truly open, our voice has evolved to be a bit different: we try to acknowledge tension and attempt humour while still amplifying and engaging honestly with our new community. Whether we’re a success in that regard remains to be seen.
Choice seven: to be or not to bilingue. As a cohort, the GCEs aren’t as natively Francophone as the rest of the public service, but we also decided early on to not slavishly translate every single tweet from one official language to the other. Rather, we committed to being franglos by mixing French and English where possible. We don’t do as good a job as I’d like, but we’ll get there.
Choice eight: tweetweetweet. In some ways, the most important choice was to just start tweeting. Laura and I just started doing it during one meeting, even before we had made all the other choices I elaborated above (i.e. no approved handle or hashtag or profile picture or language policy). I suppose you could characterize this choice variously as roguish or bootleg-y, but I think it’s more buccaneering and entrepreneurial. More privateer than pirate, if you’ll allow. We broke some rules and made some mistakes, but it’s really in the doing of a thing that you figure out what works and what doesn’t. Doing is the most important choice you can make, as a Tweeter or as an entrepreneur. You’ll make mistakes and get messy, but you can’t fail if you never chose to try.
