Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), has turned BIS’s Twitter strategy into a generic template Twitter strategy for government Departments.

It’s a fascinating document, and very useful and extendable to other organisations (with tweaking). Basically this sort of thing (or thought about strategy at the very least) is important because you can’t have conversations with an organisation, only the people within it – so it’s worthwhile detailing how they are to act when “speaking” on behalf of the organisation.

Use of Twitter opens up another method of communication, and while the ideal is to hire people who understand how to use social media (or train those that already work there) it’s very useful to have guidelines and overall strategy. What happens when the person tweeting as your organisation is on holiday? Who makes sure that responses happen (what’s the CRM system for incoming tweets)?

It doesn’t need to be this detailed, but it is important to think about it – and the metrics for usefulness are well worth thinking about too.