Ok so it’s unasked for advice but here goes anyway. You may have heard that Brian Cowen is interested in blogging and twittering. On Saturday last while speaking to Marian Finucane about Twitter I had hoped to be able to deal with the matter of the Taoiseach and Twitter but alas there was only so much that could be covered in a shortened interview.

The advice to the Twaoiseach (ducks) remains though.

1. Do it yourself – readers need to ‘hear’ the Clara accent and even dare I say it the odd ‘going forward’ – If you are not sending the actual tweets then let your new twitter a/c be like the No. 10 Downing Street a/c and tell us who will be staffing it.
2. No pictures of you over a keyboard sending the first tweet – that’s been done before and the readers won’t believe it anyway. Get to know your blackberry/iphone.
3. Don’t start tweeting just before an election – politicians should use social media for a while before there is an election – it looks like they are desperate when they all start tweeting/facebooking etc. during elections and not during the rest of the year.
4. No late night tweeting unless the country needs calming down. And even then…
5. Engage with some other tweeters from time to time and don’t just use it for broadcast. Even if they just other politicians you are tweeting to or retweeting it makes the account look alive rather than megaphone.
6. Talk to some other tweeting members of your party – Not @DaraCalleary who’s twitter account is just links to a load of press releases – how about @damienblake, @lawlessj, @conorreidy to mention a few.
7. Think very carefully before you pay someone to teach you, your colleagues or your officials how to tweet or before you engage with someone who claims to be a social media guru expert. Remember the company that got the contract from your government for that knife crime campaign?

Anyone else got some gems?