36 Facebook pages
33 Twitters accounts
13 UTUBE Channels
Something tells me SFO is not shy of social media – however there was a time……….
The City/County of San Francisco started planning to use Facebook
in 2008. Fear of the unknown, Ron Vinson, (Director of Media in the Department
of Technology), tells me did exist in the beginning. The city wasn’t sure what might unfold and
whether it would be necessary to police comments so they pursued the idea of
just using Facebook as an information provider without allowing comment. This didn’t actually eventuate, it was an
open forum from the start because 1. - the City believes in taking risks but
more importantly, 2. - wanted to use the medium as the powerful engagement tool
that it is.
Ron says “it’s all about the content. You need to put the
fun stuff on there”. Build community engagement
and awareness through innovative ideas that promote business. For instance they ran a competition where
people took a photo of the food on their plate before eating when out at a
restaurant - it raised awareness about the businesses and was entertaining to
see the different food displays.
Now Twitter (SFO tweets its way to the top) has taken over from Facebook. The Mayor is a profound Twitter user,
Customer Service takes inbound requests from twitter and the City puts trivia
questions up, reminders on events, questions on various city issues and commuter
or parking information changes.
It’s where the public
is – governments need to reach out to their public. “Who needs offices” where Ron’s parting words.
Nice one Soph. Good to know Graham and his crew have us on track with this one!
ReplyDeleteKelly
Thanks for this one Soph - I have an interest in Social Media and how it's affecting the way we do things, and interact with each other and our community, so hearing that the Mayor is keen twitterer is really cool.....how many followers do they have?
ReplyDeleteNicole
Hi Nicole, the Mayor has 20,861 followers, Shannon was saying how innovative the Mayor is so he is a good one to watch. Here is his account. https://twitter.com/mayoredlee
ReplyDeleteHis staff in the Innovation office have about 3000 followers each on their Twitters
The SFO new phone line 311, which is a very innovative new call centre (I need to blog about it) have 10,699. Most of the City's Twitter accounts have around 10,000 followers. It's definitely used a lot over here and they joked at the start of the conference that people turn their phones off UNLESS they wanted to Twitter!!!!
Soph
That's great - communication churning out all over the place - there must be a significant amount of trust to keep all those platforms moving - really interesting. How does the city record these interractions - maybe just a percentage are captured - it would be interesting to know.
ReplyDelete