Follow Friday: @JasonintheHouse

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R), the Utah representative from the high-tech hills of Silicon Valley, has some advice for his colleagues who are on Twitter.

“If you want to have success with it, you have to do it yourself,” he told The Hill.

He speaks from personal experience. Chaffetz has written his own tweets since he signed on to Twitter during his 2007 campaign for Congress. He said when he was elected to the House, “that’s when people started paying attention to it.” 

Things really started taking off during the debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation he opposed. “Where Twitter really lit up this year was on the SOPA fight,” he said. “We were tweeting about SOPA, and I could really see people tweeting me and by the thousands they added me on.” He now sits just shy of 24,000 followers for his account @jasoninthehouse.

And not all of them are his constituents. “Twitter, for me, has much more of a national following. It’s not as Utah-centric as some of the other tools, but that’s a good thing.” This way, he suggested, a much broader base can find out where he -- and Congress -- stand on important national issues.

“But you also have to have some fun with it,” Chaffetz said. “You can’t take yourself too seriously.” 

Chaffetz sends some tweets because “it just makes people smile.” 

He referred to a tweet from earlier this week as an example.

“When I was on the road on Monday, I was down in more rural parts of my district...I took a picture of a doughnut, a half-eaten donut,” he said.

Cake doughnut in Nephi on the way to Beaver. Townhall at noon twitpic.com/adjapx

— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) July 30, 2012

If all a lawmaker tweets is his or her next CNN appearance, “you’re gonna put people to sleep,” he said.

Chaffetz acknowledged the dangers of Twitter, as well, saying he learned the hard way that lawmakers have to be careful.

“I remember when the president was first here, the teleprompter fell down right before the speech. It just went, crash. I was tweeting that and you could see immediately the news outlets pick up on that,” he said.

He warned his fellow lawmakers that it’s “out of bounds” to tweet during the State of the Union, though beforehand is safe. Chaffetz wrote an op-ed for CNN about learning his lesson in 2009.

One core value of Twitter keeps Chaffetz coming back, even after awkward moments, and that is “instant communications with tens of thousands of people,” he said. “It’s hard to write in 140 characters, but the way you can link to things, or let people know where you’re at, or what you’re doing … it’s just magical that way.”

But to keep it magical, you have to keep it real, he said, dismissing Twitter’s value as a “spun-up PR tool.” The Hill investigated the number of lawmakers who send their own tweets or use a ghostwriter earlier this week, and many digital strategists agreed with Chaffetz.

“Authenticity is paramount. It’s only successful if it’s authentic,” Chaffetz said.

Previous "Follow Friday” Twitter profiles have included Democratic Reps. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), Mike Honda (Calif.), Jim Himes (Conn.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Jared Polis (Colo.), Judy Chu (Calif.), Jackie Speier (Calif.), Chellie Pingree (Maine) and Edward Markey (Mass.) and Republican Reps. Bob Latta (Ohio), Glenn Thompson (Pa.), John Shimkus (Ill.), David Schweikert (Ariz.), Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), Billy Long (Mo.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Geoff Davis (Ky.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Justin Amash (Mich.) as well as the Republican-led House committees on Oversight and Government Reform and Financial Services.

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