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 objective for this particular Social Media Campaign is to increase community engagement. Strategy #1: Consistently produce and disseminate quality content with attention-grabbing graphics that is of high interest to the Miramar community. Subsequently, the IRHIM Facebook Page entices users to frequent the page for information, as well as providing for an open medium to engage in dialogue with the City. The page features posts regarding City events and activities, such as, ground breakings, ribbon cuttings, youth sporting events, etc. Strategy #2: Community Engagement Launching day: engaged the community through a social media selfie contest during the city's Holiday Lighting event. Attendees were encouraged to first like the IRHIM FB Page, upload a selfie with #HolidayLighting in the comments. Two winners were randomly chosen and received a $100 gift card. Community Events and Activities: promote City events (MLK Celebration, Relay for Life, Career Fairs, etc.). The results were outstanding! OMPR received approximately 200 likes within the first couple of hours and have a 5 out of 5 star rating to date! Launched: December 6, 2014. Total Organic Likes within the first couple of hours: 197, Total Organic Likes within the first week: 216. Total Organic Reach within the first couple of hours: 1,285, Total Organic Reach within the first week: 1,889 Total likes as of 2/13/2015: 303. As of 2/13/2015: 5 out of 5 Star Rating
The objective for this particular Social Media Campaign was to increase community awareness and attendance to an event to be held at the Miramar Cultural Center featuring celebrity author, Zane. She is the NY Times Bestselling Author of 30 books and the Publisher of Strebor Books/ATRIA/Simon and Schuster, as well as the Creator, Scriptwriter and Executive Producer of two Cinemax series: Zane's Sex Chronicles and Zane's The Jump Off. The first feature film based on one of her works, Addicted, was successfully released by Lionsgate on October 10, 2014. Strategy #1: Community Engagement: OMPR utilized targeting social media marketing tools to increase our social media presence throughout the nation. OMPR created an interactive social media experience (posting, conversations, etc.) via Facebook and Twitter through the City's Official accounts, as well as the Miramar Cultural Center accounts. In addition, OMPR also engaged in live tweeting directly from the event. Strategy #2: Leverage celebrity author's social media accounts to increase the campaign's reach (Zane promoted the event directly through all of her social media accounts as well as reposting the City's messages. Zane has more than 1,000,000 likes and followers through her social media accounts). Strategy #3: Leverage sponsor social media accounts to promote to a larger audience (e.g. Books & Books engaged in reposting messages from the City's accounts). Strategy #4: Leverage a nationally syndicated radio talk show social media account to reach a larger audience. The results were phenomenal! OMPR originally estimated a turnout of approximately 150 participants prior to the campaign, however, OMPR was able to double the number of attendees as well as expose our social media presence to a larger audience. The strategies worked so well, OMPR has implemented these efforts throughout all of our social media campaigns.
In light of all of the recent animosity and negativity exhibited toward law enforcement across the country, the Dunwoody Police Department has made a special effort to post items on Facebook which show the human side of law enforcement and which helps us bond with our community. After the two NYPD officers were killed, Sgt. Robert Parsons took advantage of the free flight offer from Jet Blue and attended one of the funerals. When he returned, he shared several photos and his story internally with the staff and with Chief Grogan. Chief Grogan asked Sgt. Parsons to share his experience on Facebook with the citizens of Dunwoody. Unbelievably, the post went viral with over 20,000 likes, shares & comments reaching a total of 543,000 people. The story was picked up by the local media on both television and in print. This post demonstrates how social media can be used to reinforce the positive relationship a department has with their community if care and effort is put into the content.
Very actively serving constituents through social media. Office of the Governor, Department of Environment, Maryland Emergency Management Agency, Department of Environment and many others are all widely available and responsive with social content. Great example of a government leading in constituent services with social media.
NYC has close to 100 different agencies that are available through social channels. The City handles New Yorkers questions, queries and reports through the centralized channel for 311 which always provides answers and responses from the experts. So great to see government opening up to social in this way.
The Governor's Office is leading the charge to transform how the government for the State of New York is using social to serve citizens. By opening up the Governor's Office as well as regional 511 units across the states as well as State Lotto, Agriculture, Office of General Services and others it is increasing citizens' access to the agencies that affect their lives. An awesome example of how having a vision for social improves the job a government does for the citizens it serves.
Oakland County's Instagram account has seen phenomenal growth and engagement since we shifted our strategy to focus on citizen's content. In the past six months we have doubled our followers and increased citizen engagement by 820%! Previously, we were only posting 1-2 times per week and our content was promotional, branded, and impersonal. As of August 2014 (before we shifted our strategy) we had grown our following to 430 in 2 years and averaged 5 likes per photo. As of September 2014, we shifted our strategy to focus on citizen engagement and we started sharing our citizen's photos at least once a day. We look for beautiful, fun, slice-of life photos that show our citizen's living, working, or playing in Oakland County to share. We find these photos by monitoring our #OaklandCounty hashtag and through various geo-location based searches. Since we started featuring our citizen's content, we've grown to 868 followers and averaging 46 likes per photo. Now, more citizens are engaged with our account and we've started to build relationships with our followers. Citizen's love when we engage with and feature their photos, so now more people have begun using our hashtag and currently there are over 5,600 posts with #OaklandCounty! It has been so exciting to see our Instagram turn from an ineffective promotional platform into a social place where we can really connect and engage with our citizens. Below are screenshots from: our account, our most popular photo ever, our engagement analytics, and search results from #OaklandCounty.
The State of Maryland has opened up dozens of agencies to constituents through the social web. From BWI Airport to the school board to the department of transportation to emergency management- the state cares about reaching citizens where they are, on social media. The OEM is so accessible and does a great job of engaging constituents with content during even non-emergency scenarios so constituents are already part of the agency's community and know the state agency is listening and available when the agency is needed most. Great job Maryland- a true example of the power of state and local government's ability to serve through social media.
To ensure our fans stay engaged once they have "liked" our page we felt it was important for our citizens to feel as if they are contributors to our page. We began asking our fans to send in their photos to tell the scenic story of Lakeland. Where are their favorites spots and visual scenes that make our City stand out from the rest? The response has outstanding. In less than one year we have received over 700 photos and the album has been shared over 830 times along with over 2,600 likes. We receive submission almost every other day for this album. During the months of May and November we have also encouraged followers to recognize and honor a loved one who is a past or current veteran of the military by sending us their photo. Each photo also had a small note of gratitude posted from the person making the submission. For this album we have received over 300 photos, 94 shares and over 1,100 likes. This has helped to further solidify a personal connection between us an our followers. They love seeing their loved ones on our page. Due to the success of photo sharing, we have done similar submission requests for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Graduates and our larger events.
The Neighborhood Commission Office provides administrative and technical support services to the Neighborhood Commission, the 33 neighborhood boards of the City and County of Honolulu, and the City administration. NEIGHBORHOOD BOARDS: The 33 neighborhood boards are comprised of 437 volunteer board members serving as advisory groups to the Honolulu City Council, the City administration, departments, agencies, and other public officials of the state and federal governments. Oahu's neighborhood boards meet monthly, and function as an island-wide communication conduit, expanding and facilitating opportunities for community and government interaction. MISSION: Founded in 1973, the mission of the Neighborhood Commission is to increase and assure effective citizen participation in the decisions of government through the establishment of policy, providing oversight and evaluation, as well as facilitating the efficient organization and operation of the Neighborhood Board System. OFFICE RE-BRAND: With only 18% of board members being 45 years old to 18 years old, and 38% of members serving 10 or more years (Neighborhood Commission Survey, 2014), the NCO identified a need to increase citizen engagement to reflect the true demographic make-up of the island and to bring more people into the system. Additionally, through outreach done at community events, we found that 35% of people we spoke to had never heard about the system at all, with 44% being only vaguely familiar. This signaled to the NCO that building general awareness of the system was paramount, and that all means to do this must be employed. In order to build awareness and engage a demographic not previously reached, and to maximize limited funds, the NCO launched its social media suite in 2013:
Facebook: /NeighborhoodCommission. Twitter: @HNLNCO. Instagram: @HNLNCO. Tumblr: hnlnco.tumblr.com. Google+: Neighborhood Commission Office, City & County of Honolulu. YouTube: Neighborhood Commission Office, City & County of Honolulu. Through NCO's social media accounts, the office is able to engage a wider demographic, develop stronger relationships with the public, utilize free digital tools to a perform public service, promote public board meetings, disseminate important City-related information, and bolster system awareness and presence. INCREASING DIGITAL PARTICIPATION: NCO TWEETUP 2014: In keeping with the Office's digital objectives, the NCO held the City and County of Honolulu's first-ever Tweetup on February 11th, 2014. City administrators, council staff, media
trendsetters, tech visionaries, Neighborhood Commissioners, Neighborhood Board Members, & community members gathered in the heart of downtown Honolulu to discuss civic engagement
in the digital age. Participants engaged in interactive discussions on the value and importance of civic engagement in the digital age, while the office was able to receive best practices and ideas to implement. As a result of the successful and well-received event, the NCO saw a marked increase in online interactions with both current and newly inspired constituents, as well as some attendees
eventually becoming board members themselves. Through presenting an overview of the Board System, the event increased general awareness.Tweets from the event were compiled into a Storify, which gives an idea of how the event unfolded, here: https://storify.com/hnlnco/ncotweetup
Engaged & informed citizenry is part of the Summit County Council's Mission Statement. Summit County values citizen input and involvement and understands the importance of an informed citizenry. The County recently adopted (January, 2014) a comprehensive communications plan utilizing current technology to encourage citizen participation in all facets of county government. The results of this campaign were: tremendous growth in our Social Media presence, large crowds in attendance at public meetings, and more public involvement in local county programs and initiatives.
Per capita, Hamilton, Ohio may have one of the best local government social media team in the world. With a population of 62,258, Hamilton has a staggering 5,900 Likes on Facebook, equal to close to 10% of our population. And this number keeps growing. Granted, a few of these Likes are people residing outside of the city, however the vast majority are local residents who, over the past year and a half, have become accustomed to engaging with the City of Hamilton via social media. Moreover, we have increasingly become more engaged with our Twitter following and we continue to seek out new social media outlets, such as Nextdoor.com, that will further our efforts in community engagement. On July 1, 2013, a creative team of individual implemented a Social Media Engagement Plan for the City of Hamilton. Our Social Media Engagement Plan revolved around our objectives to increase social media awareness and social media engagement, therefore encouraging citizens to become more civically involved. Upon implementation, we witnessed a great deal of success over our 60 day test period at the end of which, the City had a total of 3,401 Likes on Facebook, an increase of almost 15%. This was staggering in comparison to the previous average of about 1% growth per month. On Twitter, our new followers per month increased by more than 250%. Increasing our likes and followers was an avenue for which the City could expand its reach and influence, giving us a broader audience of citizens that we could inform, engage, and encourage to become civically involved. Today, social media has become an important part of how we as a municipality connect with our community. We communicate directly with resident, providing information and working so solve problems and issues quickly, similar to our 311 system. Furthermore, it has become a great marketing tool, as we spread positive stories and photos submitted by our community. As an example, we have a Photo of The Week Contest as part of our regular content where we highlight a weekly photo submitted to us from our Facebook community. Furthermore, we engage in conversations on Twitter, actively searching for individuals who tweet about our City and working to create a dialogue. Reaching around 20,000 people a week and engaging roughly 10% of those reached on Facebook alone, Hamilton has committed to furthering our connection to the community through social media by integrating it into our strategic plan. One of the Hamilton's 12 Strategic Plan strategies focuses on empowering neighborhoods to be engaged, safe, and clean. Because we understand that having engaged citizens will make safer, cleaner neighborhoods, our social media team works to create even more engaging, quality content. In fact, we have began incorporating our monthly statistic into our performance evaluation on what we feel is the holy grail of Facebook metrics: the ratio of daily engaged users to daily total reach. After analyzing 2 years of past performance, we set a baseline for what we were achieving currently, which was a ration equal to about 10% (equivalent to a C letter grade on our scale). Our goal is to raise this to over 12% within the next year. By creating high quality content and responding quickly to our community, we are confident that we will continue to grow our levels of engagement. Lastly, our social media team has recently launched into a new platform, Nextdoor.com, a private social network for neighborhoods and communities that provides an easy way for neighbors to talk online and engage with each other. We have promoted Nextdoor in conjunction with our 17Strong neighborhood initiative, which defines our 17 neighborhoods and provides a framework and sense of identity to rally individuals, groups, and other organizations to take pride in their particular corner of our city. Currently, we have 12 of 17 of neighborhoods actively represented through Nextdoor within their neighborhoods with the platform taking on a variety of everyday uses from listing items for sale to reporting neighborhood watch issues to finding lost pets. We plan to continue implementing best practices in social media with the goal of further growing our audience and engagement and ensuring all 17 neighborhoods are actively involved with Nextdoor.
The city of West Linn spent all of 2014 working on a concept plan to redevelop an area of town near the West Linn-Oregon City Arch Bridge (westlinnoregon.gov/archbridge). As part of the project, we wanted to get as much of our community of 26,000 involved as possible. We used a variety of ways to reach out to people, including Facebook. We came up with the idea of teaching people about the history of the area in order to get them thinking of the future potential for the area. Because attention spans are short, we wanted to break it down in "bite-size" pieces, thus #BiteSizeHistory was born. Over the course of 2.5 months, we posted one bite of history each evening. We started with the Native Americans and the falls and worked our way up to the current day and the plan. This campaign to engage and educate citizens made more than 35,000 reaches. Our Facebook page has about 2,800 likes. When it came time to approve the plan at the city council level, we had an outpouring of support, and on a recent survey statically valid survey, a whopping 81 percent supported development of the area.
Since 2010, CRESA has engaged citizens from around the world in a daily preparedness challenge during the National Preparedness Month of September. This has been a fully coordinated and organized effort on social media, asking their followers to complete a daily challenge. The prizes have been crowdsourced each year, resulting in very few dollars required for this effort. Players have participated from nearly every state and a number of countries outside of the United States. Past players have become CRESA volunteers and gotten very involved in preparedness efforts in their local communities. CRESA staff use the game to test new platforms and learn how best to incorporate social platforms into their emergency response plans.
When a firefighter is killed in the line of duty, it becomes not only a private affair for the family but also a very public event for the citizens whom he or she served. In celebrating and honoring the life of Erik Steciak, we knew we needed to reach a large number of citizens while still maintaining the dignity of the service and respecting the family's wishes. We found little precedence for live tweeting a funeral but hoped we could use social media to help the public understand the proceedings and participate as well. While a funeral, especially one involving a line of duty death, is surrounded by solemnity, we felt it necessary to take a risk by making the services a very public event through social media. The level of citizen engagement and the tone of their responses tell us that this is what citizens are looking for from their government organizations. We believe we set a standard for other public safety agencies to follow when a line of duty death takes place.
Hillsborough County used Facebook and Twitter to facilitate and promote a Fan Favorite� Adopt-A-Pond Best Maintained Pond Competition. The campaign engaged followers to base their decision on a comparison of pictures of community-maintained ponds that were taken during a judging event for the annual Adopt-A-Pond Program's Best Maintained Pond Competition. More than 200 votes were cast in the survey promoted by social media. The campaign engaged citizens in determining successful Adopt a Pond program implementation and supported increased awareness of the Adopt-A-Pond program's value to County residents. Alternatively, the competition supported increased awareness of the County's social media presence to a new audience by inclusion of the results in the program's quarterly newsletter.
The City of Austin Office of Public Information received a directive from the City Council to engage citizens at a town hall the following week. Staff from the PIO office was to get public feedback/input on Council's proposal for a new way to conduct meetings, which would be more inclusive and engaging for residents. City staff worked to develop ways for citizens to get engaged during the televised meeting, including by speaking in person, calling 3-1-1, using the city's online community engagement portal, and, most notably, by using social media. A recording of the televised town hall can be found in the attached links. In order for the social media engagement to be a success, a hashtag needed to be developed and disseminated to the public so that everyone who wanted to give feedback would be able to. City staff came up with the hashtag #myatxgov and posted it on various social media sites in the week leading up to the meeting, encouraging other City agencies and local news sites to do the same. During and after the meeting, City staff monitored the hashtag to see what kind of feedback we were receiving from citizens. We organized the feedback (209 total tweets using the hashtag) into categories and submitted them to both the City Manager's Office and City Council so that they could weigh and implement changes suggested by the citizens. A version of the feedback submitted to the City Manager and City Council is contained in the other document. This version contains the tweets but leaves out the recommendations made to City officials.
In order to really get the message across about the importance of seat belt safety, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) went out of the ordinary and ran a thought-provoking ad on the subject on television during Super Bowl XLVIII. The ad was also posted on social media as well. The feedback was about 50-50. There were many that were appalled by our seeming insensitivity on showing such a stunning commercial knowing families were going to be watching. Others, after some thought, realized that this was meant to spark a conversation, and applauded us for talking about seat belt safety. All in all, it was a great campaign because it got people talking, regardless of what side of the argument they were on, and this in a state where there isn't a primary seat belt law.
No one likes a boring Facebook Page. Our mission? To show that government can be cool. After all, we want to have a page worth ""liking""! The City of Burlington has been working to make its Facebook page more engaging and relevant for citizens. We want to connect with our community members on a more personal level, and not just talk to ourselves. We have implemented several strategies to achieve this. First, the City uses hashtags to engage citizens and create a dialogue. We created a hashtag #WeServeWednesdays where staff are asked why they choose to be public servants. The public really seems to enjoy getting to know employees better! We also frequently post #ThrowbackThursdays and #WaybackWednesdays to highlight Burlington history. Everyone loves to see what our community used to be like. We also have specific hashtags for special events so citizens can join in the conversation. Second, we have started to incorporated multimedia elements, such as video, to engage our audience in innovative ways. Some of our top posts have been videos of special events, Recreation programs and weekly highlight videos, where weekly announcements are presented in a 60 seconds or less video. Citizens enjoy the visual elements and the variety. We have made an effort to be a part of the social conversation on our own page and beyond. There's something to be said about answering comments and messages in a timely manner; citizens appreciate that someone is listening. We have also joined several community Facebook groups to help spread our messages and answer any questions residents might have. We have also made sure that all of our platforms are converged so that residents can easily access our Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, other departmental Facebook pages and website. We want to make information accessible and create an online community for Burlington. Although Facebook is our most successful platform to date, it's important that we provide multiple ways to access information. In fact, Facebook has become the number one referrer to our website! Lastly, we try to post things that are just fun! For example, we have started to run contests to engage the public. Our most recent photo contest, "I Heart Burlington" asked citizens to share a photo of what they love about Burlington for the City's 122nd birthday. Moving forward, we hope to incorporate more fun interactive elements into our strategy. Our goal is to not only disseminate our key messages, but to present information in a compelling way, in effect pulling citizens in. Beyond just increasing likes, we have focused on generating conversation, amplification and reach. As a result, we have seen significant growth over the last six months, and have created a loyal following.
Building on our State of the City Address, in which it states that the Citizens are really what makes Bryan Better, we started a social media campaign called "I Am Bryan" and used the hashtag #BetterInBryan. We've had people submit their own photos and we've set up a booth at the First Friday in Downtown Bryan and had people line up to be part of this and to share their stories or just be part of the campaign.
The idea was to thank some employees for thankless jobs. The Public Works Refuse crew are out there in extremely hot/cold temps, while facing a multitude of distractions-including antsy drivers in a hurry to get around them. These guys deserved some notoriety and it was nice for our department to be able to do that for them since we had one of the only social media accounts at that time. Showing thanks for others and telling their story helps connect and engage our citizens to their city.
The City of Alamosa created a social media page (Facebook page) to better engage our community and offer another communication tool to communicate with our community. Our Facebook page is just a couple years old but we have managed to get almost 1,000 "Likes" and have been able to reach thousands of people with our posts.
The CHP is always searching for new and better ways to engage the public we serve. Using available social media sites seemed like a natural way for the CHP to provide education and information to the public. The citizens we serve are able to share their thoughts and feelings, whether by comment or concern, about CHP operations and allow them to feel connected to our Department. Our goal with this Facebook page is to improve the image of the California Highway Patrol (CHP), build trust with the public, and provide traffic safety education. The Department utilizes the Facebook page to advertise various traffic safety programs geared toward different cultures and different age groups. The CHP page provides a valuable means of engaging communities in public education, emergency or traffic notifications, and crisis communications. The CHP utilizes Facebook's new business platform to manage 47 different Facebook accounts including a headquarters page reaching hundreds of thousands of people a week, eight division level social media accounts, 4 recruitment pages, and 34 local area office pages.
The Wake County Transit Strategy is a partnership that includes Wake County, Triangle Transit, Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO), City of Raleigh, Town of Cary, Research Triangle Foundation, NC State University and Raleigh Durham Airport. In Fall 2014, the partners hired two transit consultants to review previous work produced by local planning staff and facilitate the creation of a community vision for transit in Wake County. This new effort will have two major initiatives, public outreach and public education about the various trade-offs to be made when investing in transit. The Wake County Transit Investment Strategy kickoff was held Monday, December 8. It was an important opportunity for the community to learn about the new transit strategy and begin discussing some of the choices and trade-offs that will need to be considered. More than 550 people attended from all parts of the community and participated in activities before and after the meeting. Those who attended in person, as well as those at home had an opportunity to ask questions and get more information. Prior to the meeting, members of the community”those planning to attend and those who couldn't make it”completed a brief survey asking what they were most interested in hearing at the meeting. Six possible questions were included and participants indicated what they wanted to know more about. In addition, another 70 questions were submitted. These results helped shape the discussion at the meeting. The meeting was very popular on social media: @waketransit tweeted before, during and after the meeting. The most popular tweet was "The transit meeting is underway!" Follow @waketransit for live updates #waketransit That tweet had 3166 impressions, and eight retweets.
Even more important than the official tweets were the numerous tweets that took place by those at the meeting. - #waketransit was the 12th most popular phrase in Raleigh on Twitter on December 8. Between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. December 8 (when the meeting was taking place) #waketransit was the second most popular topic on Twitter. @waketransit, kickoff, transit and @humantransit (one of the consultant's handle) were also in the top 15 - On December 9, #waketransit was the third most popular phrase in Raleigh on Twitter, trending for 19 hours.
We post our found animals in an attempt to reunite them with their families. We have been extremely successful in our engagement with the community.
