I agree Twitter is probably underrated in the EA community. However, I would disagree with (or at least strongly caveat) this statement: “I imagine someone who sought to talk to staffers in a particular area could after about 6 months of posting for 3 hours a week.”
One meeting with a staffer is not difficult to get if you’ve been in DC for a while. The question is what you do in that meeting and what you want to get out of it. Twitter is a tool that you can use to promote ideas/research/etc., so you need those pieces before Twitter is useful. Staffers won’t find it very helpful if you meet with them and you can’t go deeper than Twitter-level conversation. Typically, real impact from staffer engagement comes only after the third or fourth meeting, and those follow-ups require trust and deep analysis.
So I think Twitter is useful, but I don’t think it’s a substitute for more “traditional” think tank work, and I would discourage people who don’t have much of a policy background from using Twitter in order to get a meeting with a staffer — I’m not sure if you were suggesting that, but it’s possible to interpret your statement that way, so I just want to flag that before people start rushing to Twitter en masse. :)
I agree Twitter is probably underrated in the EA community. However, I would disagree with (or at least strongly caveat) this statement: “I imagine someone who sought to talk to staffers in a particular area could after about 6 months of posting for 3 hours a week.”
One meeting with a staffer is not difficult to get if you’ve been in DC for a while. The question is what you do in that meeting and what you want to get out of it. Twitter is a tool that you can use to promote ideas/research/etc., so you need those pieces before Twitter is useful. Staffers won’t find it very helpful if you meet with them and you can’t go deeper than Twitter-level conversation. Typically, real impact from staffer engagement comes only after the third or fourth meeting, and those follow-ups require trust and deep analysis.
So I think Twitter is useful, but I don’t think it’s a substitute for more “traditional” think tank work, and I would discourage people who don’t have much of a policy background from using Twitter in order to get a meeting with a staffer — I’m not sure if you were suggesting that, but it’s possible to interpret your statement that way, so I just want to flag that before people start rushing to Twitter en masse. :)