Introducing the Federal Social Media Index

Today, we're happy to announce the Federal Social Media Index, a living dashboard that measures the activity of 125 federal departments and agencies on Twitter.  Powered by ThinkUp, it's updated weekly without human intervention or editorial review, an unbiased look at how well agencies are engaging their followers. 

While it's obvious the federal government's embraced social media on Twitter and Facebook, each organization uses them in different ways and it's tricky to tell who's doing it well. Some use it for press releases alone, while others are soliciting opinions from the public and replying constantly. 

Our hope is that the FSMI helps bring the people behind these accounts together, helping them learn from each other's efforts, as well as informing any future agencies getting ready to make the plunge.

 

What We've Learned

For us, it's surfacing interesting material that would go unnoticed and underappreciated, like the Marines asking which military ready-to-eat meals they'd choose on Thanksgiving or the USGS playing a geology alphabet game with their followers.

And a huge congratulations to the State Department for taking the first Top Agency of the Week crown!  

We hope there's something for everybody here:

• Federal agency leaders. Learn how your organization is performing relative to others.
• Social media managers. See what's working for yourself and others like you.
• Organizers. See where government is open to feedback and use those entry points to create change.
• Citizens. Find new ways to connect with your government and see who's listening.
• Journalists. Track federal technology efforts and find trending conversations.

This is a first initial release focused mostly on questions and answers asked on Twitter, but expect it to evolve rapidly. 

(Note that we're excluding the White House's Twitter account, at least for now. With over 2.5M followers on their main account, they're a juggernaut. We were interested in surfacing other agencies, and it didn't seem fair to put them on the same playing field to start.)

 

How We Made It

We started with this index of over 450 U.S. government departments and agencies. After removing duplicates and individual states, we paid the anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk to track down the Twitter account for each agency.

To get more accurate results, we asked three people to find each account. We accepted their answers when two or more workers agreed, and hand-checked the rest. The result was this database, downloadable as a comma-separated text file or Excel document.  (If we missed any, please let us know!)

 

After that, we used ThinkUp to archive every historical tweet from each account and every new message that mentions them.  So far, we've indexed over 18,000 tweets posted by those 125 users, and nearly 900,000 mentions.

Unfortunately, the Twitter Search API doesn't tell us which of those mentions are actually replies, or the post they're replying to, so a separate process retrieves each mention individually to find the original tweet. In the last two weeks, we've collected nearly 4,000 verified replies and growing constantly.

As the dataset grows, we're looking forward to adding weekly data to see how this activity trends over time.

 

Your Turn

This is just the start, and we need your help to make this better. If we missed any departments or agencies on Twitter, or you have ideas to make the FSMI better, we'd love to hear them. We're adding new stuff constantly, and any feedback is welcome. Feel free to comment here or you can email me at andy@expertlabs.org.

Comments

[Paul R. Pival]

Very cool, thanks for building? What would it take to build something like this for Canada (or any other country), or a specific educational institution? Is this something you'd take on, or are there tools to go along with ThinkUp that would allow us to do it ourselves?

[Jonvwest]

Andy - fascinating, look forward to watching this grow. Not sure how deeply you were interested in splicing each department but the USDA has a number of agencies with twitter accounts that aren't on your list, though some of them are. USDA maintains a list of them here: http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=USDA_STR

Jon.

[Cascadia]

It looks like you missed @ONC_HealthIT - they are responsible for advising HHS on health IT public policy and really started to figure out how to use their twitter account last year after some of us asked them to.

[Royalmintuk]

This is really interesting. Would be good to see these figures plotted to represent the rate at which accounts are acquiring followers.

[ChristinePool]

This is very interesting info. One error on your list, though - @Visa_USA is not a federal agency.

[Grahamlampa]

Andy,

This looks like a great tool for us here at State Department. However, it doesn't render correctly in IE7, which we are all sadly stuck on in our browsers. If it's not too onerous, could you do some testing to make it work?

Also, we have about 193 Twitter accounts at Departmetn of State. Do you have the ability to roll them all up into a digest for our agency overall? I can get you that list--just hit me up with a dm on Twitter for contact info.

Thanks!

Graham Lampa
U.S. Department of State.

[Jonverve]

Excellent work guys. Looks great. I just wanted to mention that over at http://nasatweet.com (community wiki site for NASA Tweetup events, now on #31), we created a page which lists all the twitter accounts that NASA runs.

Its been a great crowdsourced experiment: http://nasatweet.com/wiki/Official_NASA_Twitter_accounts which is synched with our twitter list here: https://twitter.com/#!/tweetupspace/official-nasa/members

We are now up to 154 active accounts (not including the almost 40 inactive accounts).

I know there are lots of lists (including govtwit.com), but perhaps there could be a way for you to do something really creative around federal twitter accounts?

[Mattclare]

Great work.

A technical question: How do you index tweets with ThinkUp for a twitter account you don't own (and presumably, didn't have the owner share their oAuth credentials?)

Thanks

[Waxpancake]

Great question! The ability to add an arbitrary Twitter account you don't own is built into ThinkUp, but the "add an account" form is disabled by default in the code. (Mostly because only a subsection of ThinkUp's features are unavailable without oAuth, and it's mostly untested in recent versions. But it does work!)

[AIDS.gov]

This is really fantastic. We didn't notice AIDS.gov on the list (@AIDSgov) in the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy, HHS.

Thanks.