Facebook, Twitter, blogs... knitting the message together
Social media interacts with government

Young and old, if you have a computer or a handheld device such as an iPhone or a Blackberry, you are discovering that you can do more than write documents, do e-mail and talk to the world on it. Today, social media, a term that didn't exist just a few years ago, enables us to rediscover people we knew in our past, and stay in touch with our circle of friends in a whole new way in the here-and-now.

Relationships and social media

It also opens up new opportunities for business people, professionals and those of us in government. For more than a generation, definitions and redefinitions of so-called "relationship marketing" dealt with how a buyer and a seller added value to one another's business through a close-knit association in how they did business. Many vendors, for example, would work with their suppliers to provide a broader range of products and services so that the buyer would do, as the expression was, "more business with fewer people."

That is the marketing theory in a nutshell.

One challenge in government, especially in urban environments, is that what you do as an elected representative is really important to a lot of people, but there had, until recently, been no cost-effective, easy and reliable way to keep in touch with the people you represented as an elected official. Conversely, the people who are concerned about what happens in govenment had, until recently, no easy and accessible way to connect with the men and women whom they sent to govern in their name.

So welcome to the 21st century.

Using social media to keep in touch

Social media diagram

For most elected representatives, there is a web site. To augment it are public meetings and a newsletter, often also called a "householder." We've gone much further than that. Check out the other ways that we can keep in touch with you, and you can keep in touch with us.

Posted or revised: May, 2010