On Thursday afternoon, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh will undertake his first Reddit AMA to help bolster his administration’s theme of municipal transparency. The mayor has taken to social media a handful of times already, with just north of 100 days on the job under his belt – a noticeable difference from his predecessor that allows him to connect directly with those who frequent the networking platforms.
But the City of Boston’s social media strategy is one of the multifaceted variety. On the surface, it might seem as though Boston’s digital strategy is to simply dispatch 140-characters over Twitter or upload a selfie to Facebook in hopes of it going viral.
BostInno spoke with Lindsay Crudele, Community and Social Technology Strategist for the City of Boston, about how the city is transitioning its social media from the Menino administration to Mayor Walsh’s – and how to implement it moving forward.
Much of what goes into connecting with online users delves deeper than quick responses or timely updates. It’s about longterm planning, centralizing platforms, syncing up various citywide departments and organizations, and giving the mayor the opportunity to spread his digital wings and fly.
“We have conversations that are strategically planted across different kinds of niche audiences for two reasons,” explained Crudele over a cup of coffee.
One is that we want to reach people who are only interested in food or are only interested in history about Boston on a day-to-day basis. And in many ways can help improve their daily experience and quality of life, just in those particular sets of subjects. But then what we’ve done – actually done – is build this whole enterprise system where we can flip everything into emergency mode and suddenly, now, we’re able to amplify the most important messages during public safety situations.
I know it’s painful, but let’s wind back the clocks for a moment to when Boston was buried under obscene amounts of snow. Using the enterprising platform HootSuite, Crudele was able to coordinate between the likes of the Public Works Department and @NotifyBoston Twitter handle to deploy content to better inform the city of snow emergencies, parking bans and transportation issues.
She describes it as the City of Boston’s digital roadmap which consolidates the creation, operation and purpose of each account.
HootSuite has also enabled Mayor Walsh to traverse his way in and around social media. To date, he’s hosted two Twitter chats and a single Facebook Q&A – and he’s become familiar enough with the mediums that he even takes it upon himself to engage with his followers, responding at his own behest.
It’s a new approach to contemporary Boston, one fitting for a new era higlighted by a new administration. Crudele worked as former Mayor Tom Menino’s digital lead for his 2009 re-election campaign. It was around this time that the first official City of Boston social media feeds were created, but not necessarily embraced by Boston’s longest serving mayor.
For the man known colloquially and affectionately as the neighborhood mayor, being out in the thick of Boston’s numerous communities – being seen – was something more fitting for Menino than typing away on a computer or uploading messages to the Internet.
As Crudele puts it, “His enthusiasms for it was expressed a little differently. I think [Mayor Menino was not] a person who really had a huge interest in using it first-hand. He got its value and that it was bringing him to a new audience, so he would empower staff to use it, reflective of his beliefs and activities.”
For Mayor Walsh, a person who wants to have his finger on the button of all city aspects while simultaneously embodying a new age of Boston, learning social media was mandate. He leaves all of the planning up to Crudele, though.
In Boston, planning content ahead of time is a double-edged sword. We all know (and dread) that it’s going to snow heavily in the winter, for example; she sat down in November and charted what the content was going to be. Having content banks in place ready and scheduled within the central feeds, as well as having fellow city department social media liaisons equally prepared, allows for some added flexibility in the day-to-day process.
That is, unless we have more winters like the one we’re still trying to pull ourselves out of. We all know how fickle Mother Nature can be when she turns her eye to Boston. Predicting when it’s going to snow is difficult enough, but trying to gauge how much will fall is next to impossible.
In that respect, Crudele and her constituents are able to solicit help from Bostonians across the city, who are more than willing to chime in with something the city may have over looked.
“I feel like I’m seeing a change in the way that people talk about city government and the way they think about city government because it’s not like the sitcom version of city government,” Crudele mentions optimistically. “I see people saying, ‘Why are you complaining here? Why don’t you report it to Citizens Connect?'”
The growing mentions of Citizens Connect – an app that allows residents to alert the City of Boston to neighborhood issues, such as potholes, damaged signs, graffiti, etc. – prove that Crudele’s digital strategy is working. Some, however, still don’t understand that social media is really an umbrella term for a number of online intiatives, not just Faceook and Twitter.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that people don’t understand how it works,” posits Crudele. “They’re just experiencing that we’re accessible. People are getting their questions answered and they know how to reach us.”
