By Grande Lum and William Froehlich
This edition of Nextdoor’s Community Engager is largely excerpted from Divided Communities and Social Media: Strategies for Community Leaders, a report developed by the Divided Community Project (DCP) at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. The purpose of this publication is to support community leaders who seek to use social media and online resources to address divisive community issues. The Social Media Report identifies strategies to seize the opportunities and confront the ever-changing obstacles created by the increasingly pervasive use of social media and proliferation of social media platforms. Sources for the research referenced in this article can be found in the full report linked above.
Phenomenal growth in the use of social media is altering the ways that community members perceive and interact with each other. Does your organization have concrete plans in place to take advantage of social media and online resources during tranquil time and during crises? Have you worked with the community to develop, advertise, and hone your plans? Is your agency using social media and online resources as a tool for developing relationships across your diverse community?
This article outlines five ways public agencies can leverage the use of social media to engage with residents during tranquil times, during community crisis, and following civil unrest.
#1. Develop Trusted Online Information Sources
Community leaders across the nation are putting information online in efforts to serve residents’ needs, build trusting relationships with them, and counteract inaccurate news. Putting information online requires intentional effort. Despite the additional resources required, leaders who implement these approaches seem to be pleased with the outcomes.
Getting verified, developing social media policies for staff, publicizing social media handles, using hashtags, and quickly posting detailed, useful information online and on social media are a few familiar strategies.
Agency leaders have the opportunity to develop trust using online tools if they can communicate authentically with residents. Using an informal, personal voice, humanizing communications by illustrating leaders’ interest in the community, and being open to and accountable for errors are a few methods for becoming authentic. The San Francisco Chronicle has noted San Francisco BART’s twitter handle takes a conversational tone.
On Nextdoor, officers routinely upload profile pictures, use their first names, and share information using a friendly, approachable tone.
#2. Increase Input from Residents
Social media and online resources are opportunities to engage residents. For example, the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department has used Periscope and live tweeting to respond to resident comments and questions while working. Other communities act on good ideas received on social media — and tell residents their concerns have been resolved.
Katie Nelson, Social Media and Public Relations Coordinator for the Mountain View, California Police Department, said, “People first and foremost want to feel like their feelings are being heard.” Residents will be more engaged when public officials disclose names and not just departments or titles. The City of Seattle offers virtual question and answer sessions with the mayor and other city officials on its Seattle Channel.
#3. Promote Dialogue
Agency leaders can use social media communications to promote in-person conversation and to allow those who cannot attend an event to watch. This is a time of change in which social media experts are developing platforms aimed at building a sense of community –and yet researchers continue to extol the superiority of in-person events. Research indicates that in-person conversations, compared to online ones, less often turn negative, and people are more open to each other’s views. In addition, as people spend more time online, social scientists point out that they are interacting less often in person, with a loss of the humanizing effects of friendships gained, and the potential for more demonization of other groups.
Communities and platforms across the country are encouraging face-to-face interaction. Two examples include Leadership Austin’s “Engage on the Go” and the Delaware State Police’s use of Nextdoor to encourage in-person help during a snowstorm.
#4. Combat Hate Speech and Discrimination
Users react with surprise to the unregulated nature of social media platforms. Seventy percent of 18–24-year-old internet users have experienced harassment online. Online rhetoric is often more offensive, more frequent, and heard by a larger audience, and goes unaddressed. Social scientists report that social media insults negatively affect a person’s sense of well-being. Anonymous deliberately offensive posting, often of racist and sexist comments, has become so common that it has an official name: trolling.
Community leaders suggest monitoring social media for hate, discriminatory and threatening speech. Scott Paine, Florida League of Cities, counsels, “If you find a negative comment on social media and want to post a reply, just post a link back to your own site. The point is that you don’t want to ‘fight on their turf’ or let an argument occur…. You want to bring the discussion back to your turf, on your terms.” As an agency you can use your social media tools to show residents know that you care. You have the opportunity to work with local business and social media platforms to combat hate by supporting the development of policies and platforms which discourage hate and discriminatory speech.
As a way to keep track of concerns raised by groups within their communities, and the depth of their feelings about them, agencies can turn to data analytics. Developing these policies and practices with the involvement of a stakeholder group can avoid both the reality and the perception that data analytics will interfere with users’ privacy or be used to chill speech or assembly.
The depth of social media mining varies. It may mean merely watching the trending information already available on social media platforms. At the other end of the social media mining continuum, it might involve the use of powerful algorithms that combine social media data with geography, research on human behaviors, and other factors. The mining may also range from noting existing concerns to predicting future actions.
Your agency has the opportunity to use social media and online data to support efforts to address community concerns, but using data to learn more about the community to build trust and to improve community relations risks doing just the opposite if local leaders do not develop transparent policies that take these concerns into account. Though the data may be publicly available, the public often responds negatively to new ways of using it though data analytics, especially when done by the government.
Conclusion
“Your community is online,” social media expert Colin Rule says to community leaders, “You need to be online too.” Social media presents opportunities for communities to provide reliable information to residents, improve their ability to hear and serve constituents, and strengthen connections and pride among residents. To aid the development of a community social media toolkit, the Divided Community Project has developed this self-assessment. Communities harness these opportunities when they engage authentically online and on social media platforms, transparently articulate policies, and encourage residents to engage in the development of community policy and in face-to-face conversations.
About the Authors:
Grande Lum is the Divided Community Project’s first Director. Grande is also the founder and a Senior Advisor at Accordence, Inc., a research fellow and lecturer at the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution at Stanford Law School and a Senior Advisor for Nextdoor.
Before joining the Divided Community Project, Grande directed the Community Relations Service (CRS) at the United States Department of Justice. CRS focuses on preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, and in restoring stability and harmony. During his tenure, CRS won the Association of Conflict Resolution Peacemaker Award and an American Bar Association Problem Solver Award. Lum guided CRS through several racially charged public demonstrations, including those in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore. Lum renewed focus on staff training and development, specifically on mediation and dialogue facilitation, and expanded CRS’ services in the areas of Transgender and Law Enforcement interaction, Intellectual Disabilities, and Restorative Practices.
Prior to joining CRS, Grande was director of the United States Small Business Administration Historically Underutilized Business Zone Program, was a clinical professor at the University of California Hastings School of the Law where he directed the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. Grande has more than two decades of conflict negotiation experience including work with the Harvard Negotiation Project and Roger Fisher’s Conflict Management Inc. Grande authored The Negotiation Fieldbook and Tear Down the Wall: Be Your Own Mediator in Conflict. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
William “Bill” Froehlich is the Associate Director of the Divided Community Project and the Langdon Fellow in Dispute Resolution at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law where he teaches mediation, negotiation and alternative dispute resolution and manages Moritz’s top-ranked Program on Dispute Resolution.
A former labor attorney, Bill served as an advocate in mediation, arbitration and other dispute resolution forums. Bill earned his J.D. from The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law and is a graduate of Denison University.
You can reach the Divided Community Project through its Director, Grande Lum at lum.23@osu.edu.
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