As a city administrator/manager, you are charged with a number of responsibilities. It is presumed you have staff to handle communications or social media. Still, we at Tuxedo developed the questions above to give you something to ponder.
1. How comfortable with using social media are you personally? For your city?
2. What is your city known for? What would you like your city to be known for?
3. How active is your staff in citizen engagement? How engaged are your citizens?
4. Do you have a full-time communications staff member? To what degree are they charged with engagement?
5. How integral is branding for your city?
So as social media becomes more and more prevalent, municipalities can either embrace it, smother it, or ignore it. Either way, in an era when citizens are increasingly using social media to help form their decisions and for opinions, social media usage by municipalities must be taken as integral to your success.
As stated in Governing Magazine, “As you seek constructive ways to use social media outlets and to avoid public records issues, consider using developing a plan for social media activities, leverage state of the art tools like Hootsuite to help you manage multiple accounts and track mentions of your city on those networks. Furthermore, consider the potential of a city social media working group that consists of pertinent staff and community members.”
As more citizens get news and form opinions through online discussions, cities may not be able to afford to not address their social media needs in their respective communities.
As a city manager what are you struggling with today in building better communications with your community? Share your thoughts!!
