One of the interesting and fun things about Twitter is that you can sometimes get to know about someone pretty quickly — their daily activities, hobbies, personality, etc. — from their feed. For example, I have been ‘following’ FEMA Administrator-Designate Craig Fugate on Twitter, and I have enjoyed learning about him.
On Sunday, Fugate, currently Director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, tweeted some good photos of his kayaking trip to Shellmound, Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast with the message: “there is life outside of emergency management.”
Those travels may have contributed to the previous tweet from his BlackBerry: “Very dry Florida, be FireWise. www.firewise.org”. Fugate’s Twitter feed also shows the future FEMA Administrator’s sense of humor. On the day he was nominated by President Obama, he tweeted: “Pigs do fly.”
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jonathan Haber // Mar 11, 2009 at 12:23 pm
It may be interesting, but is his Twitter feed effective? I just checked, and see that he has 73 followers. His recommendation to visit the FireWise web site might as well have fallen of deaf ears since 73 is an extrememly low number of people to reach with such an important message. So, if he’s truly interested in getting the word out to Florida citizens about the the FireWise web site, he better get the staff at FEMA to add it to their web site somewhere. I have nothing against people following his travels, but let’s ensure that citizens know that the best place to get safety and security messaging is at Fema.gov, ready.gov, etc, not Twitter.
2 admin // Mar 11, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Thanks, Jonathan. Fair point. Though I expect that once he officially takes over, Fugate and FEMA will be extremely active in using social media and the web.
-John
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