Counties enter MySpace-YouTube generation
Social networking sites reaching new audiences, younger generation
After St. Lucie County, Fla. opened a new skate park last month, amateur video began to pop on YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site. Erick Gill, the county’s public information officer took note.
The county’s cable channel had also shot a 10-minute video of the park’s grand opening and ribbon-cutting. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we post our video on YouTube as well?’ …Because it will reach that demographic we’re trying to reach — because a lot of skateboarders probably aren’t watching the government access channel, not yet anyway,” Gill recalled.
In its first three weeks, a six-minute version of the video was viewed 368 times. That same month, a video lecture on the county’s video-on-demand site received 175 hits in three weeks.
 Increasingly, counties are using free social networking Web sites to connect with their residents “where the eyeballs are” — online — on sites such as Friendster, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo and Facebook.
“We’re moving with the times, and there’s not really a downside to it,” said Owen Torres, a Miami-Dade County, Fla. media relations specialist. He and several others noted that the sites’ only “cost” is staff time to create and maintain the pages.
Once considered largely the province of teens, social networking sites are reaching that group but are also attracting growing numbers of adults across a range of ages. “We’ve seen a positive side as to bringing messages to our youth,” Torres said. “We’re also touching 30-year-olds as well, who use these pages more and more, we’ve come to find out.” Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older, according to the company’s corporate Web site. A Fairfax County, Va. spokesman said its YouTube site has drawn viewers “from 13 to 70” years old.
Social networking sites build virtual communities of friends who share interests and activities, or who want explore the interests and activities of others. People invite friends to join their network or a friend can request to be added.
Fairfax County set up pages on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook earlier this year. Some sheriff’s departments are using video-sharing Web sites to run recruitment videos. The police department in Arlington County, Va. posts crime scene surveillance videos on YouTube and solicits tips from the public.
Fairfax’s use of social networking sites is part of an effort to expand the county’s online presence and reach a younger audience, said Jeremy Lasich, a county spokesman.
“We know in today’s Internet society, it’s very hard to draw eyeballs to county government Web sites,” he said. “The younger generation probably isn’t spending its time going from county site to county site to find out what’s happening in their backyard.” Research, he added, shows that sites like Facebook and YouTube are where the young eyeballs are.
It made sense “from a business case” to migrate to where the Internet generation already is, rather than “having them come to us.” The county’s most popular video on YouTube is a police department recruiting video, posted in May that has been viewed 2,000 times. “So that’s 2,000 in four months who may not have otherwise have seen that video.”
Public safety agencies have been among the early government adopters out of necessity. Miami-Dade’s police department (MDPD) set up a MySpace page last year to discourage sexual predators who visit the popular social-networking Web site, which appeals to a younger audience.
Visit the page, and you’re greeted by a pounding soundtrack: the themes from TV shows The Unit and Cops — Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Its graphic design might be hard on aging eyes, but its bold colors are designed to grab attention.
MySpace members can “friend” MDPD — a verb in social networking parlance — and add a police badge logo to their personal pages as a deterrent against sexual predators. The department has more than 4,000 friends, said Joe Cabado, a detective with MDPD’s Internet Crimes against Children Squad.
The page has tips on safely using social-networking sites and links to public safety Web sites such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). It’s also monitored by the department’s Sexual Crimes Bureau.
Arlington County police use MySpace similarly. It notes that nationally, one in seven youths ages 10 to 17 has been sexually solicited or approached online, according to NCMEC.
“We don’t want to mislead any kids or their parents into thinking this will completely protect them online,” Police Chief Doug Scott said in a news release. “But if they link to our page, hopefully the police emblem will scare off anyone with unscrupulous motives.” College interns in the Criminal Investigations Section designed the MySpace page and help monitor and maintain it.
As the popularity of social networking sites has grown, so has the innovation in the ways they’re being used, and not just by the men and women in blue. Gangs have also moved online. The practice has come to be known as “net banging” — a play on the term “gang banging.”
“With a simple click of the mouse, anyone, including young children, can take a tour of the life of a gang member, view someone brandishing a gun, painting graffiti, and many other activities,” according to the National Crime Prevention Council’s online newsletter, Catalyst, June 2008.
In Miami-Dade, Cabado said, “I’ve helped out the local prosecutors here prosecuting gangs because they create pages on MySpace. These guys had everything from the drugs and guns that they use — they were bragging on it on MySpace, and I guess they do it to intimidate other gangs.”
It isn’t all doom and gloom in Miami-Dade. The county is also using social networking sites to recruit elections volunteers and to connect kids to cheap tickets to local entertainment events.
A county-maintained MySpace page called CultureShockMiami is “a way for students ages 13–22 to get $5 tickets to Miami-Dade’s top performing arts groups, live theater, cultural institutions and destination events,” according to the Web page.
An ElectionReady page informs youths: “You can pre-register at 16 years-old and you’ll be able to vote if you will be 18 on or before Election Day.”
Fairfax County’s Lasich said it’s not hard to get such pages up and running. “It’s content that’s already on our [county government] Web site; it’s content we’ve already sent out in news releases. It’s content we’ve already pitched to the media, and we’re just repurposing that information and getting it to an audience that may not have seen it the first time we tried to promote it.”
Lasich and St. Lucie County’s Gill agree that on video sites, shorter is better. “We aim for probably two to three minutes,” Lasich said. “We know, again through research, that attention spans are really decreasing these days. Usually people who are on YouTube are watching multiple videos.”
His advice for anyone contemplating taking the social networking plunge: Work very closely with the county attorney’s office. “There are issues that private organizations may not have but government organizations do, even with accepting the terms of use that usually you just go onto these sites and click ‘yes, I agree.’ For a government, there are certain challenges to just clicking ‘accept’ on some of those” in terms of the rights one might be waiving.
Since these sites are linked to a network of “friends,” counties are careful to distance themselves from what may be on friends’ personal pages. Fairfax County’s YouTube page comes with a disclaimer: “The county is not responsible for the content provided on ‘related’ and ‘promoted’ videos that are accessible from this county’s YouTube channel.”
Lasich further advises: Work closely with county IT departments and establish policies regarding whether employees can access the sites from their work computers. Many employers block access to such sites.
Because county employees can be some of local governments’ best ambassadors, it’s useful for them to have access to the same information the public has.
“Our motto here is ‘common message, many voices,’” Lasich said. “So this is essentially another voice for us, another avenue for us to get the word out.”
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