How Local Governments Communicate Through Township Social Media

It’s 5 AM on a Monday morning in January.  Crunch time.

You have a business meeting in Houston at 1 PM.  You have downloaded your boarding passes, your bags are packed.  All that is left is to get to BWI for your flight.  There’s just one small hitch:  Overnight the region got hit with 12 inches of “ a chance of flurries.” You are snowed in and don’t know when the township plows will be through your development, let alone whether major highways are open.  Or do you?

You get your SmartPhone and check the messages. Sure enough, there’s an updated message from your township informing you that a neighboring development has been cleared and the plows will have yours cleared within twenty minutes.  All major arteries are open.  No need to cancel that trip.

That township undertook the effort to set up a social media strategy for constituent communications.  And the resident in this story took advantage of the opportunity to sign up for emergency notifications.

The township in this scenario is fictitious, but each municipality in PA should take the lead in developing a social media strategy to give vital and timely information to its residents. Regrettably, too few local governments in the Commonwealth have prepared for this.  If you talk to many local officials about constituent communications, they often tell you they do periodic newsletters.  Newsletters can be informative, but not very timely.

Where health and safety is concerned, PA municipalities need to begin developing plans that give their residents necessary and critical information quickly, and that must include Facebook, Twitter and other  emerging technologies.  Immediacy of information can be crucial, and nothing beats social networking when the need to communicate to a wide audience is urgent.

Why should municipalities do social networking?

• To notify residents of adverse weather conditions through advisories and periodic updates.
• To inform residents of key meetings, such as organizing a Block Watch..
• To warn parents of lock-downs at a local school in the occurrence of a weapons incident.
• To notify residents and re-route traffic around the scene of an accident or fire emergency.
• To alert residents of a missing child or elderly patent, of a rabid animal, or of contaminated water.
• To advise residents of a delay in the trash pick-up or water main break.

Municipalities are given the task of providing an emergency management plan in the event of local, regional or national emergency.  That plan must include communication of critical information.  Social networking will take work and time to set up and to acquire the e-mail addresses.  There must be security to protect the database from unauthorized personnel.  But once accomplished, the cost  to operate the system is negligible. In hard economic times, efficiency in communicating with  constituents is something municipalities cannot overlook.

This posting originally appeared in the Triadvocate, the e-newletter of Triad Strategies, a Harrisburg public affairs firm where Dumeyer is senior consultant for education issues. Triad is a provider of services to public and private clients who use social media as part of an overall communication strategy.