The environment twittering

by Eleonora Anello

What is the best use of Twitter by the environmental communication is an entirely new subject, little known but certainly of great interest. The year we left behind will go down in history as that of social networks. In Italy it was no doubt the boom of Twitter.

In the environmental field the last brave to jump into microblogging was the Arpat inaugurating his account @arpatoscana.

To tweets, short messages containing no more than 140 characters, have been given updates on the Tuscan environment and the main events that involve the agency. In particular, news and information on the environmental status of the territory; flash events on the agenda and control activities, updates on new legislation, any information relating to environmental emergencies, reports of meetings and events, publications of reports produced by the agency; as well as multimedia materials such as videos and images.

«Experiment and test its presence on social networks is one of the goals ARPAT was given in 2012 - said in a press release - Among the possible options, Twitter was chosen for the natural aptitude towards this social media to support the real-time information and frequent snapshots. Twitter inserts the information tools of the agency acting as a sounding board for news already spread through the website or other media but it also offers as a new channel, able to receive and convey information assets, unexpressed, as in the case of updates flash».

And to encourage dialogue and action with others, in sharp contrast to the behavior observed in the use of Twitter by public administrations, Arpat decided to integrate the new channel in its system by exploiting the capabilities of listening and dialogue sharing. The agency is indeed frequently used for operations such as selecting a group of accounts to follow (the following), the recovery of environmental information from third-party account by using the "retweet", use the hashtag, preceded by the words pound sign (#), to encourage dialogue and interaction with others.

Till now the public administration presence on Twitter is in many ways similar to their debut on the Web, where sites actually exist, but only served as a showcase. We are confident that the adoption of Twitter by the institutions concerned with environmental issues will boost soon from this initial phase, where the mechanisms of use are not yet consolidated, and learning is still in progress. In this context, Arpat represents the avanguardia of this new and fascinating way of communicating.