Government Social Media
The City Manager's Office of Marketing and Public Relations (OMPR) was established in October 2014 to expand the City's presence and marketing capabilities. Its purpose, to create, launch and implement a brand that is synonymous with innovation, culture, arts and entertainment. The City of Miramar It's Right Here In Miramar brand was introduced to showcase Miramar as a global destination for businesses, residents and visitors to live, work, play and prosper. The City of Miramar prides itself on creating and implementing industry best practice policies and procedures. We are nominating the City's Social Media Policy as it serves to provide guidance regarding the use, management, administration and oversight of social media by City employees. In enforcing this policy, the City Of Miramar will carefully balance each individual employee's legal rights with the City's legitimate needs and interests. This policy is applicable to all forms of communication on social media outlets. The objective is to implement and monitor best practice policies and procedures to ensure users are responsible and to protect the City's brand image. The strategy is to monitor social media accounts daily and provide continuous opportunities for training and development to ensure users are well-informed regarding the appropriate use of social media outlets. As a result, City personnel have upheld the standards set forth in the policy and have not experienced any negative repercussions due to social media activities. The City's social media accounts are flourishing and have increased engagement exponentially.
When creating the Oakland County Social Media Policy we engaged various subject matter experts to ensure the policy was comprehensive, effective, and functional. The Information Technology department drove the creation of the policy with members of the eGovernement social media and marketing team. Human Resources was involved from an employer/employee perspective and they were also instrumental in the distribution and employee adoption of the policy. Our legal team, Corporation Counsel, rose to the challenging of navigating the ever-changing new technology and emerging media laws. The Board of Commissioners then approved the policy. Our goal was to establish a transparent Social Media Policy that would educate and empower our employees while protecting our brand and encourage brand advocacy. We accomplished this by including a wide array of topics in our policy, ranging form how to get on social media, legal considerations, and personal use.
With social media rapidly changing and the desire for many city departments to join social media, a need was developed for a city social media policy in order to promote consistency, address how to handle user comments, to develop goals for social media pages, and to establish a process for creating accounts. The city Webmaster and Public Information Officer started developing a Social Media Policy in 2011 as several city departments were already using social media and more wanted to join. Some departments understood the communication potential social media offered, but were still unsure if they wanted to join social media platforms and wanted some guidance on the recommended process for starting an account. The policy that was created as a result includes considerations before joining a social network, a request form to be filled out so that the City can keep track of departments joining social media, procedure on how to monitor and respond to user comments, and responsibilities for departments once they join social media. The policy developed and approved in early 2012 has helped promote consistency city-wide on social media. The Webmaster and Public Information Officer are also able to administer and monitor all accounts and comments to those accounts. Efforts of communication for city news and events are also better coordinated with departments sharing each other's posts in order to help reach more users with that information. The policy and request form also has established the goals for city departments using social networks so that they can confidently update their page knowing the platform, audience, understanding the use of tags, hashtags, shares, retweets, and all while fitting the style they have developed for their page.
The creation of the Town of Summerville Social Media Policy was a collaborative effort of the Public Information Officer, Human Resources Manager, Town Administrator and the Town Attorney. Once the policy was completed it was then reviewed by and voted on my Town Council before it was included in the Official Town of Summerville Employee Handbook.
The objective of this policy was to incorporate the best practices in policies from the International Association of Police Chiefs (IACP) and the Association of Public Safety Communicators (APCO). This policy addresses not only the specifics of the official agency accounts, but also personal use recommendations.
Prior to starting my career with Ada County Paramedics, the organization had numerous, unmanaged Facebook Business and personal pages- some with as few "Likes" as 48, and one with 0. After drafting and receiving approval for the Facebook Social Media Policy through our director, our page now boasts almost 2,200 "likes" and our community engagement has elevated to new levels. Our Social Media Policy for our Ada County Paramedics Facebook page is comprehensive, in that it provides guidelines for our employees' interaction on our business page as well as expectations and suggestions for their own, personal pages. With the structure our Social Media Policy has put into place, we are able to quickly and professionally disseminate information, interact with the Ada County residents we serve and tell the story of both who we are as a agency as well as who we are as individuals, both inside and outside the emergency setting.
A comprehensive social media policy governing the use of social media both internally and externally for Palm Beach County employees. The objective was to standardize and monitor the use of social media throughout the county. The policy details design, security and legal requirements for obtaining and maintaining social media websites. The policy and standards are working well and have yielded 100% compliance to date.
This is the City of Wichia's first social media policy which provides a valuable framework for social media use by employees. It was a joint collaboration with the City of Wichita's Law Department. The policy has also provided a framework for what is allowed on City of Wichita social media sites.
