ChirpUp.com

Municipalities have an opportunity to apply many of the same open source technologies and methods being used by new entrepreneurs to connect with customers. In an era when communities need help, governmental transparency expectations are high and budgets are scarce, municipalities have a chance to get creative and find new ways to humanize interactions with constituents.

Free tools are available to mayors, councilmen and aldermen for authoring, publishing and promoting their message. Public officials can also use social media and free monitoring tools to track conversations by targeted geographies and topics. Take instance monittor.com, which is just one of many Twitter monitoring tools. You can track topics by keywords with their user interface or feed the results into a blog or RSS reader. Conversations about municipal issues are already happening. These tools can help local government inform the record, reach out, and help constituents.

Low Hanging Fruit

Obviously blogging methods have evolved to a point where it’s pretty easy and affordable to establish a two-way communication channel for public relations, outreach, advocacy, and intervention – all kinds of grass roots community activities. Municipalities actually have an advantage relative to the private sector because the “community” already exists. Municipalities who establish blogs just need to leverage their existing websites and traditional constituent touch points to build awareness. Businesses blogs on the other hand might have to spend money, time and energy developing the community.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley Goes Direct

Look at Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley’s new YouTube Channel. He’s taking his message directly to Chicago’s citizens and the national audience. There is no mediation or dilution by mainstream media – no color commentary, no editorial by the broadcasters. He’s speaking directly to us.  Daley knows that speaking directly to the citizens advances public interest because it’s cheap, fast and effective.

Plug Into Social Networks

Almost every tool we use at ChirpUp is free. WordPress is the de-facto backbone for a rich SEO friendly blog because it is open source, powerful, flexible and relatively easy to use. With some expertise, WordPress functionality and user interface can be customized and configured to satisfy all kinds of requirements. Plus there is a big community developing free or low-cost WordPress themes and plugs for social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Blogging Accelerates and Amplifies Your Message

All good communication require clarity, consistency and care. But blogging and social media communication is more efficient.  The public sector is interesting because citizens generally have similar questions. Constituents just crave a reliable place where they can pose questions and get feedback from officials. Blogging and social media isn’t a replacement for the old-fashioned handshake and face-to-face meeting. But, it does accelerate and amplify the message.

Infrastructure and Security

Infrastructure and maintenance costs are low for Web 2.0 products like WordPress. However, we recommend getting help from a trusted adviser for initial configuration, integration, hosting and launch. As for security, you must think about what it is that you want to secure. WordPress is widely adopted and hardened for security. That said, all public website have some small level of security risk. Consider hosting your blog / website at a separate facility from the municipality host where sensitive information may exist.

Inspired by interview with J. Schwan of Solsitice Consulting