Twitter Seeks "Government Liaison"

Twitter announced this week that it would be hiring its first DC-based "government liaison" to boost government presence on the social networking site. This sparked off an intense debate over the kind of person it would take to get lawmakers and bureaucrats to embrace social media.

Alan Silberberg, the chief execuitve officer of the now-shuttered You2Gov, a social media platform that connected citizens with elected government officials, argued the ideal person to walk Twitter into federal agencies would be a traditional Washington insider.

For this role, Twitter needs a government relations expert first and foremost who can work the right connections, before it needs a social media guru, he wrote in the Huffington Post.

True government relations is mostly pretty quiet behind the scenes work. It is not usually done through the amplified medium of social media -- unless that is a specific aspect to a specific initiative. Writing blogs about how great you are does not translate into you being able to handle a myriad of personal relationships and levels of government with discretion. Discretion is key to government relations.

Shaun Dakin, who is not-so-subtly eyeing the position, disagrees. "Twitter is also looking for someone that is entrepreneurial as well. That is the antithesis of government," argued Dakin, who also is the CEO of Citizens for Civil Discourse, a nonprofit that maintains a do-not-call registry to block political robocalls. He blogged,

People used to working in Govt and big companies (I was there, big time, with Fannie Mae and FedEx) are used to WAITING for permission to do things. They do research. They go to meetings. They brainstorm. They rarely DO anything.

His advice to Twitter: Find "the person [that] has had to DO. Rather than wait for permission."

Of course, the risk that arises is that if one moves too quickly when trying to lead the way, the government might be left too far behind to care to catch up.