How to get Twitter alerts about official Watertown information

Hi,

I wanted to solve a problem that I saw with how the town of Watertown shares alerts with the public. Watertown uses a website tool called CivicPlus to manage their online presence. The tool has an alert system that allows town employees to send out notifications about various goings on in town via email and SMS. I think this is a great service but with the point-to-point communication of email and text messaging it felt like it was missing a public broadcast method.

Alerts that are sent via a private list-serv and SMS have no public history and are not searchable by search engines. I wanted to create a method for those alerts to reach a larger audience and so decided to make the alerts available as Tweets on Twitter. The @WatertownAlerts account on Twitter will tweet the alerts that are sent out from the town. I’ve tested the flow but am waiting for real alerts from Watertown to start flowing in.

There is nothing magical here and I’m clearly not the first to setup an automated tweet workflow but I thought it might be useful for other cities and towns using CivicPlus to know how they can create a wider distribution for their alerts.

• Step 1: Register for the alerts on the Watertown website “Notify Me” service
• Step 2: Enter your email address, select the alerts you want and confirm the list-serv email sent from the town list-serv
• Step 3: Create a new Twitter account for the tweets (@WatertownAlerts)
• Step 4: Crete a new TweetyMail account using your email address that you entered in Step 2
• Step 5: Confirm your TweetyMail account
• Step 6: Create a filter in your email system (I used GMail) that looks for keywords (From: civicplus Contains: Watertown)
• Step 7: Configure your new filter to forward alert emails to TweetyMail (post@tweetymail.com)

When email alerts are sent by your city or town tweets should now start flowing from the list-serv to the Twitter account that you setup.

UPDATE: @WatertownAlerts posted the first alert Tweet from the town!

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Thanks,
Matt