Leadership North County is a nine-month program for government, business and nonprofit leaders that takes 30 students from across North San Diego County . I took the program in 2003.
The event was at Oceanside's KOCT studios. Before my talk (see slides below), they heard from a panel led by KPBS's Alison St. John with Tom Fudge of KPBS, Catherine Garcia of NBC 7/39, and Kent Davy of the North County Times. Later in the day, Dick Daniels of RMD Communications led a session on interviewing with traditional media and Brett Sondrup of NCTimes.com shared the innovations taking place at their local daily newspaper (check out http://my.nctimes.com for example).
This was a room full of very smart, motivated and connected people. I really wondered how this group of very involved community members would respond to the seachange in communications that they were being presented.
Mark Tucker with AECOM Energy in Solana Beach suggested that whereas newspapers used to drive many of our beliefs and behaviors, the recommendations of 30 regular people on Twitter now seemed to have a mini-Oprah effect, as he put it.
David Tarr, Director of Career Technical Education at Escondido Charter High School noted that with this explosion of outlets for your message, you have to be more careful than ever about what you post because it's going to be there forever. Others echoed that concern, but Tarr also saw the benefits of using social media for communicating with a limited budget as did others.
Tarr was concerned about letting students loose on social media sites which was interesting because several others suggested high school students could be hired to help them get this work started. (I understand people thinking that some young kid is going to make all of this easy for them, but that's a fantasy. FYI, if you're looking for the easy route and that's driving your communications decision-making, you're destined for disappointment.)
Jim Farley, who runs a family foundation, noted that new social media tools allowed you to skip the media and go directly to your audience or stakeholders.
Ligeia Heagy, who works for the City of Vista as a Management Analyst in the Engineering Department, suggested that municipalities need to communicate using whatever tools their residents expect.
Janene Shepherd, Aide to the Deputy Mayor for the City of Oceanside, noted that as soon as you discover what works for you that tool may fade out of fashion.
Jeremy Raimo, an orthopedic service line administrator with Tri-City Medical Center, felt that so many diversified outlets meant that you had to now carefully choose the right one to reach your audience. For instance, Twitter is a great medium for connecting with people aged 45 to 54--a fact that I'd shared and that apparently changed his perception about who's using social media.
Troy Strand, Executive VP of Independent Energy Solutions in Vista, said it's all about time more than anything. He could use that same time to work on the company's strategic plan, for instance, although he could see the value in raising his company's profile via social networks.
After a lot of discussion, it appeared that social media policy was the missing link for this group of leaders--which is the subject of a blog post of its own.
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