- The contract was 15000 for the work, not 7500. After the crap hit the fan they decided to not spend the rest of the money

- The contract was actually just to create a twitter account and send information out over the 10 day period leading up to the Red River game. That was explicitly stated in the contract

- OKDOT did not go out looking to do this. They were approached by Saxum and told it would be a good idea. So there was no bidding. That is not surprising. A lot of state and federal is done with no bidding.

ODOT has many resources at their disposal to generate followers. They can blast it all over their electronic signs over I-44, they can use the portable electronic signs that say “Follow @ODOT on twitter.” So I don’t buy the “they did get 500 followers in a few day” argument.

I understand that professionals develop campaigns and should get paid for it, I get it. But does ODOT really need help on how to tweet about traffic problems. They were not developing a national campaign to attract drivers to Oklahoma roads.

I think this was a gross waste of tax payers dollars. Gov. Henry is calling for 5% budget cuts across the board and this is going on. Not only did they spend $7,500 for a free account. But, what about the man hours of state employees that were eaten up in the 10 days of training. Are things are so slow around ODOT that they can afford to spend 2 weeks on Twitter training. If the training really did take 10 days ODOT should have found a provider that could accomplish the training in 1 afternoon. It is twitter after all. I wonder if a whole day was spent on how to abbreviate so each tweet is less than 140 characters?

Saxum seems to think they are above reproach on this. They are as quiet as they can be about it, which seems contrary to Renzi’s tweet earlier today about re-building corporate trust. When I made a comment about that, he decided to block me and prevent anyone from seeing his tweets without his approval. I guess Saxum really doesn’t care about trust, who needs it when the state is funneling you $7k for twit projects.

Also, since this is a government agency, isn’t this work suppose to be bid out? I would find it hard to believe that Saxum came in with low bid of $7,500. I think this should call for an investigation into all work that Saxum has done for the State of Oklahoma. Maybe they aren’t the true spreaders of good will they would have us believe they are. Maybe they are nothing but another Oklahoma racket that feeds into corruption & wealth.

On the other hand, I think an argument could be made that 10 days of training for something like Twitter is excessive. I think ODOT has a communications staff of more than five people. The skeptical pessimist in me wonders if they *really* couldn’t figure this out? Could they really not figure out how to use their massive in-house photo stock to paste one in the background of their Twitter feed, or how to load their departmental seal?

Additionally, one could make the reverse argument of what you’ve proposed: That Saxum has actually undermined PR professionals by making it appear we’ll overcharge for something as rudimentary as setting up a Twitter feed and then showing people how to use it. There are dozens of examples of Twitter feeds being set up by sole proprietors that generate thousands of followers.

I’m not saying that Saxum ripped anyone off. I know people there, and I think they do a good job. Saxum has also done a great job of being a “social media evangelist” and leading the way in this arena.

But I also think that many PR and ad agencies (ahem, cough, Ackerman McQueen) that were used to the old model of charging big bucks for their “special knowledge” and creating an esoteric smokescreen around their craft are having trouble finding their footing in this new Web 2.0 era.

While it is true, as another commenter has pointed out, that “anyone can make a web site” logic seems to prevail currently, it is also true that creating a web site isn’t as difficult or as expensive as it used to be. On many levels “anyone can make a web site” and a darned good one! The same could be said of video, which used to cost great gobs of money. One can find talented videographers now able to offer a nice product for a fraction of the cost from a decade ago.