This week's Tools for Transparency post is part of a two-part mini-series by guest blogger Justin Grimes. Justin (@justgrimes) is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies, a research assistant at the Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC), and a member of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research areas focus on information policy and information access. In general he geeks out at hacking transportation data and loves talking about all things data.

Visualizing the TransparencyCamp Community

I attended TransparencyCamp 2012 earlier this month and, like every other year that I have attended, there were lots of people and good conversations. This year I was particularly amazed at the sheer number and diversity of those in attendance. This got me thinking about the people drawn to this event and the relationships between them. I wondered, “wouldn’t it be neat to see what this community looks like?” So I decided to gather some Twitter data and do a little social network analysis on the #tcamp12 community.

Here are the results...

Click to see the full image at a a higher resolution.

What you are looking at is a graphical visualization of the community that tweeted with the hashtag #tcamp12 during TransparencyCamp 2012.

This graph was made using NodeXL and contains all Twitter users who sent tweets with the TCamp hashtag from April 28th to May 1st, 2012. In this graph you can basically see “who’s talking to whom" -- meaning the “circles” are Twitter users and the “lines” signify a mention from one user to another user. In this graph there are 367 nodes (“Twitter users”) with 1107 unique edges (“mentions”).

The graph is laid out using a Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm. Twitter users are grouped by color automagically by the Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm. Twitter users are sized by "betweenness centrality" -- a useful metric for evaluating nodes in a network besides just popularity (i.e. number of direct connections you have with other people). In technical terms, betweenness of centrality measures a “node’s centrality in the network equal to the number of shortest paths from all other vertices to all others that pass through that node”. In layman’s terms, this helps us identify the people (or "nodes") who bridge different networks or communities within a network or community. In essence, the higher the value of "betweenness", the more important you are to maintaining connections between groups. You are “the broker” between communities and have influence as such. Start removing nodes that have a high betweenness of centrality score and groups become disconnected and isolated.

The average betweenness centrality for the #TCamp12 community is 834.807. Keep this number in mind as you review the table below.

Top 10 #TCamp12 users ranked by betweenness of centrality:

@tcampdc              23502.981
@sunfoundation  16236.783
@craigfifer             15258.757
@tsagov                 14022.989
@citizentools        13420.000
@elle_mccann       12504.825
@digiphile              11569.597
@_anna_shaw       10835.748
@javaun                  8020.142
@joelogon              7213.984

Overall graph metrics:

Vertices: 367
Unique Edges: 1107
Self-Loops: 164

Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 8
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.540974
Graph Density: 0.007020443
Modularity: 0.447527

Below is another visualization of the same data but this time clustered groups are organized in boxes and the layout is done by using Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale algorithm. This graph is a little better in terms of clarity because it highlights different subnetworks.

Click to see the full image at a a higher resolution.

DIY NodeXL

So how can you do this type of analysis to help understand your community members or the ways in which they interact? Easy! and I’m going to show you how to get started. To do this I will explain the basics of social network analysis and then, I will then walk you through the process of collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social network data using a tool called NodeXL.

So what is social network analysis (SNA)?

Social network analysis (SNA) is the methodological study of social networks. Social networks are social structures made up entities (i.e. individual people, organizations, etc) and their dyadic ties (i.e. relationship, connection, etc). In technical terms we call these entities “nodes” or “vertices” and we call these ties “edges” or “links” or “connections”. A social network graph visualizes the network of nodes and edges.

Besides being just generally interesting, social network analysis is one way of helping us make sense of the world around us. Networks are everywhere. Social network analysis is a good way to understand social structures in our society and can be particularly useful towards mapping and measuring the relationship between people.

To perform social network analysis you’ll need software to help you perform the analysis (and a question). There are lots of amazing software tools for performing social network analysis to choose from: NodeXL, Gelphi, Pajek, etc. For beginners, I always recommend using NodeXL. NodeXL itself is an open source plugin for Microsoft Excel. It is free, easy to use, requires no programming experience, little prior SNA knowledge, and has wonderful documentation and a solid community supporting it. One of the nicer features of NodeXL is that it can automagically import data straight from social network sites such as Twitter and Flickr. The only serious drawback or criticism I have for NodeXL is that it Windows only and requires Microsoft Office. [Disclaimer - although NodeXL was largely developed at Microsoft, I’m affiliated with the HCIL, which has several members who have contributed to this project; I was not one of them].

As I said earlier, you need two things to do social network analysis: software and a question. NodeXL will be our software. Our question for this example will be what does network of Twitter users at TransparencyCamp 2012 look like? To answer this question I’m going to analyze Twitter activity of Transparency Camp 2012 by capturing all tweets that contain the hashtag #tcamp12.

To get the answer to this question, stay tuned until next week when we'll share Justin's step-by-step NodeXL guide. In the meantime, if you have Windows and want to start playing with social network data on your own, click here to download the #TCamp12 data file Justin used to complete the analysis above.

UPDATE: For the second part of this series, click here!

By Daniel Schuman, Cassandra LaRussa, and Ryan Sibley with Daniel Cloud, Kevin Koehler, Andrew Pendleton, Matt Rumsey, and Bridget Todd.

Twitter has become an important tool for social revolutions and civilian mobilization across the world, from Egypt to London to Iran, and has been increasingly embraced by the U.S. government. A Sunlight Foundation investigation looked at Twitter use by U.S. embassies and found that approximately 69 percent of embassies have official or semi-official Twitter accounts as of March 2012.

See our results here.

The U.S. State Department encourages the use of social media and actively tweets as part of a new “21st Century Statecraft” initiative, with diplomats required to undergo Twitter training. But why do 121 U.S. embassies have Twitter accounts, and 54 do not? What do they say through these accounts? And who listens?

Speaking in 140 Characters

Each of the 121 different embassies on Twitter has its own approach to communications. Some accounts are purely official, while others link to the personal Twitter account of the ambassador. Some embassies primarily share news articles about foreign affairs and circulate embassy newsletters, while others focus on cultural events in America and in their respective countries. Many “re-tweet” messages from the State Department and other government agencies, and some -- such as the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan -- post information about violence and safety precautions.

Most Twitter feeds have more outgoing content than interactions with their followers. Occasionally, people will tweet “at” an embassy, but embassies are not always able to answer specific questions. The U.S. Embassy in Dublin,  for example, responded to a visa inquiry by telling the tweeter to call instead.

The Egyptian Embassy, however, demonstrates how social media can be used for active engagement. Individuals and organizations regularly tweet “at” the embassy, and the embassy consistently tweets back. For instance, the embassy replied to a critical tweet with “sorry you feel that way, happy to talk with you if you like to discuss anything in particular.”  It also shows instances of policy discussions between individuals and embassy officials. For example, an Egyptian tweeted “America would never want a smooth democratic transition for an Arab country knowing that said nations are anti Israel.” The embassy tweeted back “Not true. We think that democratic transition in #Egypt is good for #Egypt, region, United States, and whole world.” It may be 140 characters, but it is dialogue.

.@occupy_tahrir Not true. We think that democratic transition in #Egypt is good for #Egypt, region, United States, and whole world.

— US Embassy Cairo (@USEmbassyCairo) March 3, 2012

 

You Speak My Language

Many embassies make an effort to connect in local languages. A fair number of U.S. embassy Twitter accounts post messages in languages other than English, including China and Spain.

Take for instance the Twitter feed for the US embassy in Athens, which happens to post to the account in both English and Greek. According Marie Blanchard, a spokesperson for the embassy, they use the twitter feed to broadcast news related to the U.S. government and Greece in addition to features about Greece. This Greece-focused Twitter feed is handled by a writer employed by the embassy, but Blanchard said that the ambassador himself might start tweeting soon, adding that the importance of Twitter to the embassy is growing.

While many of these Twitter accounts are aimed at both citizens in their host country and Americans abroad, some pick one or the other. The account of the U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, “American Corner,” is aimed almost exclusively at Macedonians and educates Macedonians about American government and culture and offers information about opportunities to get an education in the U.S. The “American Corner” is broadcast in English, however, which likely limits its reach.

Oddly enough, of the 121 embassies that tweet, only 99 have their Twitter accounts linked to from their official websites, although there are at least 119 official Twitter accounts. Ten embassy websites link to the Ambassador’s personal account, including two embassies (Japan and Bulgaria) that link to the ambassador’s personal account but do not maintain a separate account of their own. (It’s unclear whether the ambassador to Japan’s account is official.) When we started researching this story in December, we could not find a U.S. State Department list of embassy Twitter accounts, but there is now a list of 99 embassy accounts. This incomplete list suggests that embassy adoption of Twitter is a largely an organic process, and one that has outpaced headquarters.

Why Aren’t More Embassies Tweeting?

There does not seem to be a clear answer as to why more embassies aren’t using Twitter. We did find a weak correlation between how free a country is (as judged by Freedom House) and the local embassy’s use of Twitter. Of the “free” countries with U.S. embassies, 51 embassies are tweeting, and only 22 are not. Of the countries labeled “partly free,” 39 embassies tweet while 13 do not. Only 27 embassies in “not free” countries have Twitter accounts, while 16 do not.

We tried to examine whether Twitter use by an embassy correlated with Twitter adoption in a country, but we were unable to obtain reliable numbers of the number of people in a country using Twitter. (Neither Twitter nor comScore, a digital marketing intelligence firm, would release their data on Twitter usage rates.) The U.S. embassies in the top 10 countries identified by comScore for Twitter penetration all maintain Twitter accounts.  We did not look at Internet penetration rates as a proxy for Twitter penetration because some countries use a Twitter alternative.

It could be that social media activity by U.S. ambassadors could itself inhibit its adoption by embassies. (Some ambassadors maintain a separate non-embassy Twitter account.) In February for example, officials in Russia accused the recently appointed U.S. Ambassador and Twitter enthusiast Michael McFaul of “promoting regime change”  in Russia. McFaul has used both Twitter and Facebook accounts to defend himself on a large and direct scale in both Russian and English.

Although U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford was forced to leave that country in early February, he continues to use social media to communicate with Syrians and bring international attention to the violence taking place in his former host country. The official embassy Twitter account frequently links to messages from Ford via his Facebook page. The use of Twitter is unique in that it offers a way to bypass traditional media avenues and communicate directly on a large scale.

The challenges that Ambassador McFaul is facing in Russia demonstrate how U.S. embassies that participate in social media are vulnerable to backlash from their host country. However, it is clear that Twitter is has become a valuable mechanism to circumvent traditional media channels and foster a direct dialogue between foreign individuals and the U.S. government.

Methodology: To determine whether an embassy tweeted, we examined the official embassy page for a link to a twitter account and performed a Google search for "US Embassy {country name} twitter."

This article arose out of Sunlight Olympics, where staff from different departments were given a few days to come up with unique projects that drew upon their particular skills.

Image: Twitter Bird, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from Creative Tools' photostream.

Sunlight continues to be a fan of Storify, a service we've written about in the past and recently used for a Valentine's Day Super PAC post.  Storify, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a storytelling platform that helps you to curate the real-time web and use social media to tell your story.  The service integrates with many of the popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on.

For some time, you've been able to read Storify posts on your mobile device but with the launch of their new iPad app, you can now create your own stories on the fly.  As Techcrunch points out, accessing the Storify platform from the iPad is much more conducive to live reporting.

[I]magine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website.

Check out the video below to watch the Storify iPad app in action:

How about a little wonky humor for your Valentine's Day? This morning presidential candidate and campaign finance crusader Buddy Roemer started tweeting super PAC valentines. Soon others were chiming in with their own zingers, though as you'll see Gov. Roemer continued to dominate the meme. Enjoy and keep on tweeting!

In continuing with the "Google Reader is Still Relevant" meme (read Parts I and II here) I wanted to make a quick note on how I'm seeing extended value in Google Reader after integrating it with IFTTT.  Google Reader has morphed from a somewhat useful curation channel to an incredibly useful one.  On its own, Google Reader provides a number of ways to share content, including Google Plus, email and Send to:

In your Reader Settings, you can customize the services you want to use and manually add any that aren't included (here are few a services you can add yourself):

While I find the options provided by Google useful, they seem somewhat limited in comparison to what you can both add and automate through IFTTT.  With the addition of Recipes to IFTTT, you can see the clever examples of how users are tying one service to another (although with a bit of redundancy).

If you click through to IFTTT and filter by Google Reader, you can sort by popular Actions or Triggers to see how others are using the service. Triggers will show you various ways to stream content into Google Reader, while Actions offer methods for curating and sharing content from Google Reader to other sites.

Some of the more popular Trigger recipes include sharing feed items to Evernote, Instapaper and Read It Later, which are great for personal consumption but you will quickly find ways to automatically share interesting posts and pieces to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

By starring items, pushing new items from a tag or folder or by using the Send to feature, you can begin to add content to your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, Delicious and Pinboard accounts, to Storyboard, Tumblr and Posterous, to name a few quick examples.

Of course you aren't limited to just those services.  If you look at the available channels to push and pull content from, you find that you have plenty to begin working with:

I would love to hear what you come up with and if you create any public recipes.  We've created a handful of recipes that you can find here.

 

In July, I wrote about a recently launched service called "If This Then That", IFTTT.com. This services helps you automate certain aspects of online life, like sending you emails based on Twitter interactions or posting links to your Facebook wall from your LinkedIn account.

Recently, IFTTT added a new feature called Recipes, which allows you to share your automations with everyone else. You can sort the recipes by type as well as by popularity -- how new or how 'hot' it is.

I have added ten Sunlight Foundation related recipes to IFTTT to help you automate and share Sunlight-related content and events. You can see them below:

• Sunlight Foundation news updated to your email
• Get Sunlight Foundation news added as a link to your Facebook wall
• Get Sunlight Foundation news shared to your LinkedIn wall
• Send an IM when there is now Sunlight Foundation news
• New Sunlight Scribd documents will send to your email account
• New Sunlight Foundation Tumblr posts update to your Facebook wall
• Get Political Party Time events added to your Google Calendar
• Get Sunlight Foundation blogposts on Readability
• Get Sunlight Foundation Reporting news on Readability
• Retweet anything from the Sunlight Foundation Twitter account

I don't want to inundate you with Sunlight recipes, so I'll stop at 10. Let me know how these work for you and if you have other ideas for recipes I could create. If you have your own you would like to share, please the recipe with a link in the comments.

There are a ton of apps out there to help you boost your Twitter efficacy, some of the biggest being HootSuite, TweetDeck, Spredfast and CoTweet. Most of these tools either help you schedule future tweets or provide useful analysis and metrics on your reach and engagement. These sorts of applications enhance usage while making it less of a chore and provide feedback that helps you tweak your strategy, but you're usually stuck combining platforms to get the right balance of feedback and realtime usage that you want.

That's what makes Buffer -- a new web app we've been testing -- different. Buffer allows you to schedule tweets and measure feedback and relative success of each message within a single platform. Buffer suggests times of day for posting based on when you've received the most retweets, mentions and click-throughs, too.

You can check out an example of some of the feedback Buffer provides on the tweets you've posted through their platform below. There you can see the icons for the accounts that retweeted you, how many retweets you've received, number of click-throughs, mentions and favorites.

You can post through Buffer without scheduling ahead of time and you'll see utility in comparing suggested times against other times.  You'll find that certain times of day really do work better than others when trying to maximize your reach and engagement.  I've found that the 8:10am and the 4:49pm times do really well for our content when compared to other times throughout the day.

While Buffer is useful and we'll continue to test the service, I'd like to point out that automating your posts isn't necessarily the best way to engage your followers.  I would suggest a mix of buffering important tweets but continue to monitor feedback and engage your audience with sincerity.

On Wednesday Sunlight released a list of lobbyists tweeting online, allowing for collective insight into their world; who they follow; what they're promoting; and a view of how they operate through the prism of Twitter.

Yesterday Tony Hirst, lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and author of ouseful.info created a series of visualizations delving deeper into our Twitter lobbyist list.

(Please keep in mind that this is just a sampling of lobbyists active on Twitter and a snapshot of their activity, I find these visualizations more interesting than instructive.)

Public social connections between members of the @SunFoundation/lobbyists list

"Popular" friends of folk on the @SunFoundation/lobbyists twitter list

That is, folks who are followed by 20 or more people on the list...

People who follow large numbers of @sunfoundation lobbyists

Method: grab the followers of folk on @sunfoundation/lobbyists, generate a net from follower to list member, filter list to nodes of degree>=20, size nodes according to out-degree, colour according to modularity statistic identified cluster.

Snapshot of US politics?

So the methodology is a little bit involved and completely made up on this one...

For each of the folk on the @sunfoundation/lobbyists list, grab a random sample of 97 their followers (or all their followers if they have less than 97). Find the people from those samples who follow at least 2 members of the list and generate the graph of those followers and all the people they follow. Filter that graph to show nodes with degree >=100, lay it out using a force directed layout in gephi, sizing nodes according to HITS Authority, then filter it again to only show nodes with indegree of 2 or more.

The intuition is that this view shows people who are followed by large numbers of people who follow 2 or more of the lobbyists.

Bear in mind that there may be all sorts of sampling errors...

If you want to do a bit of sleuthing yourself, please take a look at the Twitter lobbyist list itself or you can download this .csv file of the last 50 tweets from 191 of these lobbyist Twitter accounts to draw a bigger picture.

Companies, politicians, celebrities and journalists have all taken to Twitter to promote their brands. But based on a search of Twitter’s API for the names of thousands of registered lobbyists, as well as interviews, lobbyists have been a bit slower to join the Twitter party.

However, some lobbyists’ tweets reveal insider tidbits about what they are monitoring, who they are influencing, and how Washington works, all in real-time.

We have compiled a list of lobbyists using Twitter on the @sunfoundation account so citizens can follow what some of them are up to. This list, which includes over 200 lobbyists, is only a sample of lobbyists using the service and we hope to add more.

How did we make the list? By querying Twitter’s API, we tried to match the names of thousands of registered lobbyists from Center for Responsive Politics data with Twitter user names. Because Twitter only allows a limited number of queries each day, matches were only attempted for about one fourth of the over 15,000 lobbyists that were registered in 2009 or 2010. When a lobbyist’s name matched a Twitter user name, and when more biographical data matched the details in the Twitter profile, the account was included in our list. Then, we supplemented the list by searching Twitter for lobbyists we are familiar with and top spending lobbying firms.

In the process, we found that, amidst a sea of quotidian, what-I’m-eating-for-dinner tweets, sometimes lobbyists provide a real-time look into how they might be influencing members of Congress.

For instance, one lobbyist, Rob Nichols, the president of the influential Financial Services Forum, tweeted live from a September charity event featuring the Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The tweet provided a rare, real-time glimpse into the details of a lobbyist attending a lawmaker’s pet charity event. Nichols said he was there as a guest of a friend and did not donate, according to FSF spokesperson Jen Scungio.

Other lobbyists tweet about their access to high-ranking lawmakers. In one case, a meat industry lobbyist revealed that he has even gone hunting with one.

Michael Formica, the chief environmental counsel for the National Pork Producers Council, was defending Congressman Ryan, the chair of the House Budget Committee, after New York Times columnist Frank Bruni accused him and other politicians of projecting themselves as ordinary, outside-the-beltway Americans to be more appealing.

Formica said he was on Ryan’s team at the annual shoot-out fundraiser for the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation a few years ago, which the NPPC and other entities sponsor.

“The one time I shot with him, he was by far the best Republican shot. We talked about hunting and he legitimately knew what he was saying and what he was doing,” Formica said.

Although the NPCC lobbies Congress, Formica himself does not, he said.

“I don’t do lobbying. I’m a lawyer and I deal with EPA. It annoys me that they list me as a lobbyist.”

On Twitter at least, some lobbyists aren’t so shy. Gregg Hartley, the senior Republican at lobbying powerhouse Cassidy and Associates, tweeted about the great view from the House Majority Leader’s office, running into GOP operative Karl Rove, and which lawmakers he’s throwing fundraisers for. That is, until he closed his account some months ago, making his past tweets unavailable (we saved some).

Still other lobbyists have even revealed when they’re going to a Capitol Hill hearing. Soon after it was announced that there would be a hearing on regulating online poker Oct. 25, Peter Dugas, a financial services, energy and gaming lobbyist, tweeted:

Dugas, who used to lobby for MGM Resorts International, which is pushing to lift the federal online poker ban, cautioned that such tweets require context. “It’s always important to have some context why you’re going. People may assume that I have a client in online gaming if I’m going.” He added, “In reality I’m only going because I have a personal interest in the issue.”

Asked if Twitter or other social media could be used by lobbyists to disclose who they are meeting with in real-time, Dugas responded, over Twitter of course, that perhaps they could “check-in on Four Square linked to LD-2.”

He later said that lobbyists could use the locational service to report with whom they are meeting and on whose behalf. That information could be linked to their lobbying disclosure form, called the LD-2. Those forms currently require lobbyists to indicate federal agencies or legislative bodies they contact—for example, the Internal Revenue Service or the House—and not list individuals within those bodies that they contacted.

Politically Opinionated Lobbyists

Lobbyists tend to use Twitter more as an outlet for their political views than a tool for disclosure. The bombastic and conservative John Feehery, the president of communications at Quinn Gillespie, tweets out links to his blog, The Feehery Theory.

From time to time those opinions coincide with his clients’ issues. While representing the Interactive Gaming Council (he no longer does), he pushed for the legalization of online poker on his blog, writing, “If people want to engage in an activity that is personal in nature, whether that activity is drinking booze, smoking pot or playing cards online, the market is going to serve those people.”

“Sometimes I’m particularly incensed by something that my clients are dealing with and I identify something in my blog,” Feehery, who blogged favorably about legalizing and regulating online poker after he stopped representing the Interactive Gaming Council, said.

Dena Battle, a tax lobbyist with Capitol Counsel, routinely criticizes President Obama.

Battle lobbies for nearly four dozen entities, including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Business Aviation Association and phRma. All three industries backed by these trade groups—oil, corporate jets, and the pharmaceutical industry—have been a target of proposed tax increases under the Obama Administration.

Susann Edwards, a Cassidy & Associates lobbyist, identifies herself on her Twitter bio as one of a “dying breed of moderate Democrats.” But her tweets tended to reveal more about her musical tastes than her work for the firm—she is apparently a fan of late 1990s hip-hop.

Tweeting for business

As both a communications professional and a lobbyist, Feehery sees the potential for lobbyists to make use of both Twitter and Facebook in the influence business.

“To be an effective advocate you have to use social media. Whether you call yourself a lobbyist, a public affairs person or a strategist, if you don’t include social media in your offering you’re just not really playing,” he said.

Yet there are hurdles for lobbyists to jump over, he said. “Most lobbyists are policy people…they typically don’t do that in social media world—typically in one-on-one communications,” Feehery said. “I don’t think lobbyists are going to use Twitter per se because I don’t think lobbyists understand public communications and how to communicate to a wider audience.”

Lobbying firms are lagging behind on the social media, said Alex Bronstein-Moffly, an online content manager at First Street, a research platform that serves K Street. “Spitting it out for the universe to see on Twitter" is counterintuitive for them, as they value the personal relationships gained from decades on Capitol Hill. They are mostly using Twitter for personal reasons and to monitor news, he added.

Twitter helped Katherine Hamilton, also a lobbyist at Quinn Gillespie and an expert on smart grid technology, enhance her credibility in her field.

“If you are a thought leader and you establish yourself through a blog, through tweeting, any kind of social media, you can present that as an asset to attract clients,” Hamilton said.

She started using it in 2009 or 2010, she recalls, as the president of GridWise Alliance. When she started lobbying for Quinn Gillespie earlier this year, she also started a smart grid blog, which she links to on Twitter. Most of her tweets—she says she is lucky to tweet once per day—are policy-related.

Careful tweeting?

Most lobbying firms we called would not comment as to whether they have guidelines for how their employees should behave on social media sites. Feehery said he did not know if Quinn Gillespie has one but he maintained that the firm does not muzzle its lobbyists.

“We encourage our folks to be part of the conversation as long as they are respectful,” Feehery said.

“I think that the most important thing is honesty. Being honest and identifying yourself and making people know when you are speaking on your own behalf," he added.

Dugas used to be able to be a bit less cautious, he said, because he worked at lobbying firm. He recently joined a law firm that also lobbies.

“Since I’ve joined it, because we are a law firm, I’m much more sensitive to my activities and the conversation that I discuss on a social network just out of an abundance of caution,” Dugas said.

 

Lobbying may be lagging behind other industries in its use of Twitter, as lobbyists favor more confidential communications, but that is not the case for at least one influential, veteran K Street insider.

Gregg Hartley, the vice chairman and chief operating officer at Cassidy & Associates and a longtime GOP political fundraiser, tweeted directly at legislators, boasted of the fundraisers he threw for them, and even revealed when he was lobbying them on a particular issue—at least when he chose to share that information.

Hartley closed his Twitter account around Sept. 1, according to the lobby shop’s spokesman, but his tweets from early April until his most recent one in late July were saved in an RSS Reader*. During that time, many of the lawmakers he mentioned meeting with on Twitter received donations from him. In total, between March and August, Hartley contributed to 19 Republican campaigns or committees, totaling $29,500, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Almost all of his tweets prior to April, which dated back to at least 2009, are no longer available because he deleted his account.

Hartley, who was the chief of staff to Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., when the latter, as the House Majority Whip, was viewed as the GOP’s K Street point man, lobbies for over two dozen companies and associations. He often tweeted when pressing lawmakers to favor a range of issues—from the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, to the legalization of online poker, to improving U.S.-Bangladesh relations.

“If you want to learn how Washington works, Gregg Hartley would be an expert,” said Missouri Democratic political consultant Richard Martin, who has known of Hartley for years, as both have been working on opposite sides of the aisle in Missouri. Hartley is a prolific GOP fundraiser, often hosting events for candidates in Washington. He is also unabashed about who he is targeting. In April, he sent out a blast email to PACs and insiders in Washington with a list of over a dozen lawmakers who he wanted to contribute to in June and “later this year,” according to an email obtained by PoliticalPartyTime.org.

Tweeting at a Tea Party freshman

From his Twitter account, Hartley often tweeted at members of Congress. Between April and June, Hartley mentioned one such congressman—Tea Party favorite Billy Long, R-Mo., seven times on Twitter.

“Billy Long would be a tough nut to crack. I’m sure he’s a pretty anti-Washington guy. It’s gonna take a few years before he learns the ways of Washington and becomes apart of that city. He may never, he may decide not to. But my guess is, he may follow in Roy Blunt’s footsteps and who better to learn from than Gregg Hartley on how to do that,” Martin said.

A spokesman for Cassidy & Associates, Tom Anderson, did not respond to a request for an interview with Hartley, and multiple direct calls to Hartley were not returned. Long’s office did not respond to a phone message or email requesting comment for this article.

During the threat of a government shutdown in April, Hartley directly lobbied Long on Twitter, recommending that he focus on long-term budget cuts.

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Hartley followed those tweets up with cash. First he tweeted about an event that appeared to be a fundraiser:

About a month later, Long’s campaign deposited a $1,000 check from Hartley, according to CRP. Then, on June 3, after Hartley took a break from Twitter for a few weeks, the lobbyist tweeted that Long noticed his absence. That same day, he tweeted about eating dinner with the congressman. On June 15, he complimented Long’s auctioneering skills; the congressman closed his auction business before joining Congress but was raising money for charity that evening.

Yet his access to lawmakers reaches far beyond the freshman class.

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That lunch with Cantor was soon followed by a $2,500 donation to Cantor’s leadership PAC, which reported receiving it days after the lunch.

That was also Hartley’s penultimate tweet. Anderson said that Hartley closed it to focus on his work.

Betting on Online Poker

In late June, just before a Texas congressman introduced legislation to legalize online poker, Hartley, one of the dozens of lobbyists pushing to legalize online poker or gambling on the Hill, started frequently tweeting about the subject. First he was in Las Vegas with his client MGM Resorts International, then he was in the “war room,” then he applauded the bill soon after it was introduced on June 24:

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Over the following weeks, he tweeted about meetings on Capitol Hill with other members of Congress. By early August, the bill had a total of 25 co-sponsors. A few days later, he had access to Barton:

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Over a week later, he tweeted about a July 8 meeting with Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., a key player in the debate, and the third biggest recipient of donations from the casino and gaming industry for the 2012 election cycle, according to CRP.

Heck hadn’t sponsored the bill yet. But he did on July 19.

Heck’s press secretary Darren Littell confirmed that a meeting took place in the week of July 4, but said that no one meeting was the “nail in the coffin” to gain Heck’s support and, if a sponsorship followed a meeting with Hartley, it was “purely coincidental.”

“I think there were some folks that were supportive of it and some that had reservations about it. We listened to them, we got their input and feedback. ...It’s kind of like with any issues, it’s never simple, especially with something as complicated as online gaming,” Littell said.

Hartley appeared to be courting other House freshman to support the bill too.

Hartley’s disclosure of meetings with congressmen is a rarity.

“As far as the lobbying community, it’s an extremely small percentage of people that are using that for that purpose and I think the reason why is a) they don’t want to talk about what they’re doing because they’re not proud of it or because they don’t want to release their clients’ business like any good practitioners,” said John Feehery, the president of communications for Quinn Gillespie.

Peter Dugas, a lobbyist at Clark Hill, said such revealing tweets might be misleading. If a lobbyist with multiple clients tweets about a meeting with a member of Congress, the wrong client may think his or her issue was being discussed. He also noted that, if accurate, opposing lobbyists can use the information to their advantage.

Misleading or not, Hartley’s twitter feed provided a revealing, 140-character view into the workings of one lobbyist, until his tweeting stopped.

 

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*The dates of Hartley's tweets correspond to the date and time they were stored in Google Reader, which might not be exactly the same as when they were tweeted. In particular, a slew of tweets were stored on April 11 (including the first two mentioned in this article) because the RSS Reader started capturing tweets that day.