You Grew Up Hating Braggarts and You Had It All Wrong
Why effectively sharing progress is vital to public satisfaction, and how social media can help.
Please join me in remembering the most irritating kid in your middle school class: the one who constantly told everyone about his test scores, his family's latest vacation to St. Barts, and his butler's latest faux pas.
And the worst part? This kid grew up to be many of our bosses (Note: He's most likely an elected official and may, in fact, be sitting on your city council), and that success is largely due to effective self-promotion.
When I speak with municipal officials today, a chief problem they face is a lack of public understanding regarding their work. How many people actually know what a city manager does? How many know what an economic development corporation does? They may have some vague, dogmatic appreciation, but more often they have no clue at all.
Problems like this have plagued government for decades. Therefore, any proposed solution must rely on resources that have only just now become available; otherwise, it has likely already been tried.
So, let's look at New York: The mayor of New York City has recently been posting social media videos showing the city filling potholes, fixing water fountains, and repairing park benches. These videos are getting millions of views and extremely positive reactions. The strangest part is that the services being covered are remarkably ordinary.
The city has always fixed potholes and maintained public fixtures - but by advertising those services, public satisfaction with that work has grown. The key change isn't necessarily in the services provided, but in showing people that work is happening.
Now the question is: This may have worked in NY, but would it really work for my city?
My team and I produce a podcast for a small city (about 5,000 residents) in Central Texas. We feature guests from all over the city - private business owners, economic development leaders, and our mayor and city manager. We then condense these podcasts into short videos and post them across social media to promote the city and keep residents informed and engaged.
The results were remarkable: Within a few months, we had thousands of followers across each of the city's pages and were getting more than 100k views a month with an extremely lean production budget and a couple of hours of filming. Feedback poured in from residents and their family members about how remarkable it was to see local issues represented online. Our campaign (which continues today) has resulted in a larger audience for the city than ever - meaning that when an important announcement comes out, they can rely on that audience to receive and amplify it.
Let's go a bit further: What if all we had at our disposal was an iPhone and a LinkedIn profile?
I have a good friend in Walton County, GA, who works in economic development and has successfully used his profile to build a huge local audience. Every week, he posts pictures announcing and celebrating attendees at a local coffee gathering, where he brings together civic leaders and business owners to discuss policy and progress. Occasionally, he posts pictures from conferences or site selection announcements, but nothing that requires a ton of labor.
Here's the kicker: The audience that he's built brings dozens of weekly participants every time he hosts a coffee hour. The sort of engagement that communications departments would kill for is being generated off this one guy's LinkedIn page - at a grand cost of $0.
I'd like to close this by calling back to the irritating kid in your middle school class - someone who, even in the absence of other skills, understood self-promotion.
That person is not more capable than you are; they're just talking about it more. Effectively communicating our local government wins is no longer a sideshow - it's part of the job. And with social media, the capacity to do so is now at your fingertips.
Aidan Evans is the Co-Founder of DSE Media which helps cities, public-sector organizations, and businesses tell their stories online by handling social media strategy, filming, editing, captions, and posting.
