Arc 3 Communications recently held a social media training seminar for local government officials in April at Vinings Bank in Smyrna. The seminar was well attended by public information officers and marketing staff from the metropolitan Atlanta cities of Duluth, Sandy Springs and Marietta; communications staff from the Atlanta Regional Commission and faculty from the A.L. Burruss Institute of Public Service at Kennesaw State University and the Political Science Department at the University of Iowa.
The Arc 3 Communications team provided an overview of the major social media platforms in the categories of social networking, micro-blogging, social bookmarking, geo-location and video and photo sharing. Sessions on utilizing Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp for local government and citizen engagement were provided.
Among the highlights, Arc 3 Founder Patrick Burns provided his “5 Good Reasons for Local Governments to Have Social Media” which included substantive reasons for making the case to elected leaders and municipal executive leadership for having a strong social media presence. This stimulated conversation and a lot of good shared knowledge from among the local government attendees on how to promote social media in local government.
Popular topics among attendees included how to utilize social media advertising to achieve real world communications objectives. For example, attendees were shown how only spending $5 to $10 to promote posts on Facebook can triple their organizations’ reach on the platform. Local governments also learned how to sign up for Twitter’s new alerts service for government agencies and NGOs which can help save lives in their community during a crisis or emergency.
Content tips such as what types of content resonate and the timing of posts were of great interest to attendees. Overviews of creating and abiding by a social media policy, implementing social media measurement and internal reporting, and social media and crisis communications were also covered.
Arc 3’s social media training seminars are geared towards those in government, public affairs and politics and have been very valuable to communications professionals in the civic arena. We are planning on additional social media training seminars in the summer for those in civic life. Social media is changing everyday with new platform updates, shifting audiences and techniques. Through our research and lab work and networking we keep up with the latest trends in social media and the civic space. If you are interested in attending one of our social media training seminars, make sure you are signed up to receive our e-mail updates and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Want to talk about customized social media training for your organization? Please contact Patrick Burns at pburns@arc3communications.com.
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