The Digital Bulletin Board

The Digital Bulletin Board:

Connecting to your citizens in the 21st century

Social Media isn’t something that is particularly new when you think about it. Societies have always found ways to share information quickly throughout their village, town, city or what have you. The position of Town Crier, Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride, the local newspaper, and television have all been ways for people to disseminate information quickly. Far from one if by land, when Facebook opened its doors to everyone on September 26, 2006, you can let people know exactly what you were doing through a status update. Twitter was essentially a ticker tape for the modern age, brief messages, often in shorthand because of the limited characters. Instagram a bulletin board.

What has changed is the personalized touch you could put on the message, the speed with which the message can spread, and the ability to connect with people in their homes without having to bring in a tricorne hat and bell. You put up a status update, tweet, or Instagram and, as long as you don’t have your page set to private, any of your followers could see what you have to say. If they found it interesting or pertinent, it could be shared to their friends. Studies show that views grow exponentially if it is shared by enough people.

These platforms have far reaching effects for municipalities that decide to adopt strong social media presences. They can brand a city, showcase positive stories for media, announce town meetings, post public service announcements, foster conversations amongst residents, generally help CEOs connect with their constituents, and even let us know if the British are coming in an extraordinarily unlikely situation.

Here are a few stories about towns and cities that have successfully adopted social media platforms.

We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

For all the extreme weather that Connecticut gets, you’d think we’d be ready for anything. We have weathered blizzards, hurricanes, and heat waves, but the one weather pattern that catches nutmeggers off guard is the tornado. Maybe it’s because of the Wizard of Oz, but the typical tornado happens in the Midwest. As a matter of fact, Connecticut averages one or fewer per year while stretches of Texas and Oklahoma can see upwards of nine per year.

So when a rash of tornadoes hit Connecticut on May 15, no one was expecting the damage to be as severe as it ended up being. But that didn’t prevent Curt Leng of Hamden from being on top of the storm, letting his constituents know what was going on with the emergency response and clean-up. When it was confirmed to be a tornado, he went right to Facebook to let people know what had happened, and that there appeared to be no serious injuries.

Many of his followers thanked him for his continued updates, urging others to “be kind and patient,” and also praising town employees for their “outstanding job of dealing with this weather event that brought areas of Hamden to its knees.” His efforts earned him a write-up in on CTnewsjunkie.com, where they lauded his ability to quickly and effectively post “scores of updates on road closings, power outages, school closings, emergency center openings, police and fire updates.”

His efforts have not stopped in the days and weeks after the tornado. In June, Leng was updating Hamden residents on the Public Works department progress to clean up the storm debris, the efforts being made to restore Sleeping Giant park, and in October about a bill that Senator Richard Blumenthal and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro have announced that will end the “harmful and unnecessary ban on federal disaster relief aid to homeowners for fallen trees and debris.”

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

One of the most obvious uses of social media is to be like a bulletin board for your municipality. Notices of upcoming events, informational notices, and the like all have a place on your Twitter or Facebook feeds as an easy way to reach citizens who don’t have the time or need to get into Town Hall. This is a social media hack that anyone can use, and one that Derrik Kennedy, Town Manager of Mansfield has been using to his advantage.

He tweets and retweets information about his town left and right, often more than once a day. On his twitter feed he gets out the information on job openings in town hall and for businesses located in Mansfield. But one of the things that a bulletin board couldn’t quite do is get input from the local residents. In early October 2018, Kennedy put a survey out on his Twitter feed to get survey responses from townspeople on new draft logos. From the press release, they are looking to develop a “comprehensive position and marketing plan to create a distinct identity for Mansfield and position it as a great place to live, do business, work, learn, play, and visit.”

And once that branding is finalized, you can be sure that the town and Kennedy will be sharing the new logo on social media. Kennedy summed it up nicely in a comment to CT&C: “Each department that uses social media will hit a different segment of the population. We also like and retweet our different department users so that those non-congruent populations can see what all aspects of the town are doing. We try our best to use social media not as just a “this is what’s coming up” method, but also to tell our story: what are we doing, what should you expect, what’s interesting around town, what should you be aware of. Sometimes it relates to local government, sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay. A social media personality is okay.”

Computer Side Chats

Quite a bit has changed since FDR first gave his revolutionary Fire Side Chat. Never before had a sitting president reached as many people as he did, and he helped the citizens of America through the Depression and World War II. These chats have continued on down through the years with recent presidents taking to YouTube instead of AM radio waves. This trend has seen its way all the way down to the municipal leader, and one of the best to do it is Erin Stewart of New Britain.

Stewart routinely takes to Facebook to livestream meetings and messages. The product was introduced just two years ago by Facebook, but since the company has made it a priority on their Newsfeed (essentially the homepage of each user, separate from their profile), it has become a very popular method of filming updates. Stewarts include short updates and longer common council meetings that can be upwards of 30 minutes.

One of the most popular videos on her page was the 2017 New Britain Year in Review. In the video, she highlighted many of the successes the town had seen over the year in a short recap. New businesses, the growing grand list, new playgrounds and skate parks, money raised for charity, and many, many other accomplishments that the town wanted to share with its residents and on behalf of its residents to let them know what was going on.

Another Side of Local Politics

One of the greatest effects that social media has had was the humanizing halo that social media can put on a person. In larger cities, CEOs can take on huge personas, the Daleys and LaGuardias of the world. But it’s important to remember that even though they are busy running towns and cities, they are still people like us. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton has taken the social media experience to the next level to great effect.

Speaking to Taylor O’Brien, Danbury’s social media expert (official title Public Relations Coordinator), she noted the great success the Mayor has had: Mayor Boughton’s accounts differ greatly from the City of Danbury social media accounts. The Mayor is able to be personable on social media. People know who they are speaking to when they interact with his posts. He is active on Twitter, where residents are able to ask the Mayor questions in real-time. After his years of engaging so openly with the community, people feel very comfortable reaching out to him this way. Because these are the Mayor’s personal accounts, he can livetweet a TV show, but he also gets to live-tweet real things that are happening in the city, like a water main break or school delays/closings.

“Twitter is the quickest way to spread information, so by being able to gain that following, he can make sure that necessary information is widespread throughout the city. When a bear had to be rescued from a tree in 2013, the Mayor coined us as “Danbeary” and people still use that term whenever a bear is spotted. While this was trending for its humor, it also let people know what was going on.”

Social Media is simply the latest and greatest way to spread information, the town crier, the local newspaper, the Town Hall bulletin board, and your municipalities Twitter feed or Facebook page. O’Brien noted that she finds “that the requests we receive on social media make it almost simpler to interact with the resident and solve their issue or address their concerns. When someone calls our office, they don’t have the accessibility of sending photos to describe their issue and they usually will have to receive a call back if the problem isn’t something we can answer right away. Leaving a message for a resident on the phone is not as simple as typing that message back to them online.”

Many CEOs around the state are using social media to the benefit of their citizens, and it’s easy, all you have to do is turn on, plug in, and get connected.