Andrea Di MaioLast Friday I spent an hour with several people from a county government in the U.S.. we had a very interesting conversation about the role of social media in engaging citizens. The population in that county is relatively affluent, young and indeed quite difficult to interest in government. Further, there does not seem to be any burning issue that would pull people to make their voice heard. Therefore, as it happens in many other places, citizens are represented by a handful of folks who show up at council meetings, and the question of whether they are really representatives of needs and wants of other people is a very legitimate one.
The county CIO who arranged this meeting said that people are probably having conversations about what should be done to improve the county when they are at a bar or are watching kids playing soccer, which is what they usually do rather than show up at council meetings.
The discussion then went into how social media could help bridge that gap and whether a single Facebook page or different pages for different agencies would be most appropriate. What I told them was that Facebook or Flickr or YouTube or any other social media is pretty much like the bar or the soccer field. People spend time there mostly to socialize with friends and peers. Creating a county or agency Facebook page and waiting for them to be friends or fans is like pretending that they leave the bar or the soccer game to come to the council meeting.
So the best option is for government folks to dress casual and join the cyberequivalent of pubs, soccer and baseball fields, to be on their own citizens’ social media groups and pages, listen to what they discuss and – where relevant and appropriate – contribute to those discussions. A county communication officer observed that the boundaries between being a member of the community and a county employee have always been blurred, and if she was at a soccer game discussing about whether the park needed being cleaned, people would look at her both as a peer and a county officer. There is no reason why this should not be the case on social media.
Category: social networks in government Tags: government 2.0
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1 Tweets that mention Why Bars and Soccer Games Are Key To Government 2.0 -- Topsy.com October 26, 2009 at 7:10 am
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2 Max Claps October 26, 2009 at 7:49 am
I watched the webcast of the interview Tina Nunno and you did with with Vivek Kundra, and I think his response was a bit disappointing from this point of view. The two-way interaction with constituents he spoke about sounded much more like good-old e-democracy, rather than crowdsourcing.
3 uberVU - social comments October 27, 2009 at 11:05 am
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4 Government 2.0: It´s about human interaction | pisola October 30, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] DiMaio about how to interact with citizens via Web 2.0 applications: “…the best option is for government folks to dress casual and join the cyberequivalent [...]
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