Not only, as I pointed out, does it offer you the chance to sign up to emails from the US Environmental Protection Agency, it also offers you the chance to sign up to Twitter information. I speculated whether this was because, “they regularly do news releases with an analysis of what’s up on Twitter and how their use of it is going” – which would make such emails obviously useful.

But no.

I’ve joined a Twitter email list and now I’m getting the department’s tweets by email.

Can’t say they don’t cater to extremely niche audiences… but can you think of a non-obscure reason why someone would find this useful?

Click on “Email updates” on the right.

You get stepped through an email sign-up process which is generally pretty good, even if the list of options for different sources of news from DECC is rather long – and it is a bit surprising to be offered email updates about what DECC is doing on Twitter. But perhaps they regularly do news releases with an analysis of what’s up on Twitter and how their use of it is going? Time and my inbox will tell.

At the next stage it gets interesting. You are then offered the chance to sign up also to email services from other parts of Government. An interesting – and potentially powerful – example of cross-marketing.

Except… one of the government bodies offered up for email updates is the US’s Environmental Protection Agency. Have you ever seen a government offering email sign ups for another government in this way? It’s not wholly illogical, but certainly unusual.