Stil­gher­rian has posted an hilar­i­ous and well-​​considered wel­come mes­sage to the Prime Min­is­ter who joined Twit­ter today.

welcome.jpgI hope both he (@kevinruddpm) and the Oppo­si­tion Leader (@turnbullmalcolm) , who’s been on Twit­ter a month or so now bother to read it and then move on to Mark Pesce’s mate­r­ial. I couldn’t agree with Stil more.

Mal­colm Turn­bull looks to be start­ing to get the use of Twit­ter, although he’s not nearly as respon­sive as I’d like. The PM has a lot of work ahead of him in both catch­ing up and drop­ping the facade of con­trol freak to really, hon­estly engage with the Aus­tralian pub­lic. If the effort is focussed on push­ing mes­sages, this will blow up spec­tac­u­larly in his face. And the back­lash from the Twit­terati will be harsh, swift and public.

Twit­ter is strange, beau­ti­ful, open, intru­sive, inclu­sive, wel­com­ing, real, human and much more. The Hol­low­men don’t get that (my brief time in a Minister’s office long ago was lit­er­ally, ter­ri­fy­ing, as they are much nas­tier and more cyn­i­cal than TV depicts). They need to be ignored as often as pos­si­ble by the PM if his foray into the world of Twit­ter is to work.

And the inter­ac­tion needs to be the PM, not any of his mouth­pieces or han­dlers. If the lat­ter is the case, then the han­dle being used is all wrong and the approach needs reconsideration.

In the mean­time, as a res­i­dent of the national cap­i­tal, some-​​time con­sul­tant to the gov­ern­ment, cit­i­zen pas­sion­ate about Gov­ern­ment 2.0 and a social media strate­gist, I’m intensely fas­ci­nated to know who’s advis­ing the peo­ple on the Hill about all this com­mu­ni­ca­tion and engage­ment, because frankly, I have no clue who it might be. Last time I con­tacted a politi­cian (at the last Fed­eral Elec­tion) and offered my exper­tise in online engage­ment, I was told “not inter­ested” by both sides of the fence.

How quickly things change.

As a side note, the issue of who is behind these efforts and who has put them together is an inter­est­ing ques­tion. Kev­inPM is demon­stra­bly a party polit­i­cal effort and not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the gov­ern­ment of the day. If it was, the use of pm​.gov​.au would have been appro­pri­ate, and could have been done as the UK gov­ern­ment does with num​ber10​.gov​.uk. The gen­eral feel of Kev­inPM and Number10 is sim­i­lar — indeed, if Kev­inPM wasn’t sig­nif­i­cantly influ­enced by Number10 efforts as a whole, I’d be surprised.

How­ever, if pub­lic ser­vants have been rail­roaded into work­ing on Kev­inPM, this rep­re­sents a seri­ous breach of the law. I’m not say­ing it has been done, but I would like to know.