Actually, I think it’s probably positive publicity for them. A lot of the comments on Plymouth forums support the move – “I don’t pay taxes for councillors to tell me what they had for lunch” etc. Of course, that may be coming from a position of ignorance about what Twitter is, but that doesn’t stop them holding that view and thinking the council did the right thing.

I’m with you in thinking that Plymouth, or any council, should be considering Twitter as a method of engagement. But the fact is – and I say this repeatedly – most people aren’t on Twitter. If you’re trying to engage with a community that includes the poor or elderly chances are you won’t find them on Twitter so enabling the officer who calculates housing benefit, or assesses social service need, to Tweet about it is not likely to improve service delivery.

One of the key things about social media, is that while they can provide a very cheap, very effective communications channel, that channel penetration (must resist temptation to come over all Frankie Howerd at this point) is low. Increasing, but low.

I would suggest councils should use these methods to engage, as much to listen to what others are saying about them as anything else.

However, Plymouth’s stance is slightly different. They’ve simply prohibited use of twitter from Council networks except for the Comms team. This isn’t switching off any ‘official’ twitter use, it’s simply preventing staff (and/or members – am less clear on that issue) from accessing twitter from their PCs in work time. Which is fine. As you say, that’s entirely up to them what to allow.

However, it does little to relieve the problem (“people speaking inappropriately”) simply because there are so many ways to update twitter – txt message and iphone sorts of updates will still be okay, even if all of the twitter API routes have been closed down – and it’s not clear they have, since the communication specifically refers to the twitter site (although that may well include APIs)

Therefore while I would say it’s up to Plymouth to determine what constitutes appropriate employee usage of their resources, the action they have taken is not likely to do much to alleviate the problem they had – plus it’s netted them a lot of publicity (probably more con than pro).