San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced today that San Francisco residents can now send direct messages via Twitter to the city of San Francisco, @SF311, to complain about street cleanings, graffiti, potholes, abandoned vehicles, garbage issues, noise complaints and more. 311 is the primary contact for city services; residents can call 311 to reach a call center to get answers to questions about city services or submit complaints.
Twitter users and San Francisco residents can simply follow @SF311 (which automatically auto follows) to send and receive direct messages about complaints and questions. The useful part of the new service is the ability to send pictures or video of various offenses, such as a pothole, overflowing garbage can or graffiti. Once you submit a DM to @SF311, you will receive a service request number. Apparently, there is a city staff member devoted to handling and responding to @SF311 Tweets.
San Francisco is also using CoTweet, a Twitter business platform that acts like a CRM, to manage and track these conversations. CoTweet’s platform supports both marketing communication and response-driven customer support via Twitter.
We’ll see if submitting complaints via Twitter helps make the city’s response more speedy. Newsom is a big fan of Twitter and even announced his bid for governor of California via Twitter.
I wish more cities would take this approach (c’mon Philly!).
This is a great idea but I don’t think they’ll do it in Philly. Complaint tweets would be up to brim of billy penn’s hat in no time.
So what exactly stops trolls from 4chan or crapholes like http://www.anonboard.com from spamming the shit out of this “service”?
forums were there in internet for such long. why they use twitter?
So what exactly stops trolls from 4 chan and crapholes like anonboard.com from spamming the crap out of this “service”?
Great, another way for the city to ignore complaints.
In other news, some where some government office now accepts emails for complaints.
Thanks for the protip Techcrunch.
I bet they’re going to be so overwhelmed by complaints that they’ll shut it down or it will become a nasty PR nightmare or both…
What if my complaint doesn’t fit into 140 characters??
No coudbt though, Twitter is chaning the way things are done.
Read why Twitter spells the end of technology blogs:
http://solarove...r-a-blogbuster/
No word yet on whether tweeting to 311 incurs a $5 chargeback to MUNI the way the phone version does.
where can i tweet my complaints about tc covering twitter crap?
lol i knew this was coming
have u tried @tcsux ?!
Can I complain that my tax dollars are going to some novelty PR stunt that was entirely possible under e-mail, Web forms, or SMS?
Ridiculous. The point is not to make it easier for people to complain but to listen when they do. Now they’ll have to wade through the clutter of a bunch of trolls to get to any reasonable complaint.
That’s a great outlet for the city to have to allow residents to express all their views, complaints in one area. Keeps things concentrated and others can view what others say.
You Americans giving the ‘Internet use’ a new meaning every day.
I drink for that!
Cheers.
Yeah, like anyone in City o’SF .gov cares! I’m shocked that they haven’t found a way to issue parking tickets through twitter yet
.
@311Toronto is listed as coming soon. The benefit of a City offering a second twitter account just for the service requests means that the city’s regular twitter account can be used to focus on general engagement efforts.
Governance 2.0 to improve life in brazlian cities: a new internet platform is trying to connect citizen’s, politicians, public officials and NGOs to improve life in Brazilian cities. The portal allows users to highlight problems, make proposals and support or comment on problems or proposals made by others. Check it out at http://www.cida...cratica.org.br/.
You can do this in philly and everywhere else using seeclickfix.com.
Not only can you create alerts for city gov but the issue will be documented publicly.
Philly has been very responsive to potholes and other issues reported on seeclickfix.
Try using twitterific with photo and map location for best results.
Also, check out the article from csmonitor about SF, SeeClickFix and Twitter:
http://www.csmo...02s01-usgn.html
Sorry,
Just tweet @seeclickfix