Click here for a Sun Sentinel article on municipalities adopting social media

This is a timely article. Last Friday I was invited to be on a media panel held by the Palm Beach County City Manager's Association. It included Mark Easton of the Lake Worth Herald, Willie Howard and Andrew Marra of the Palm Beach Post. I was there representing the "new" media as a blogger. The event happened at our Casino ballroom. Our city manager, Michael Bornstein is the Vice President of the group this year and was the host of the retreat.

If you read the article, it talks about how Broward County municipalities are slow to adopt social media when getting a message out or to better interact with the public. There seems to be an issue with maintaining and archive of the postings on a site such as Facebook due to Florida's open records laws. But it looks like there are ways to do that which don't break the bank.

My message to this group of Palm Beach County city managers was that they need to be telling the story of their organization through a social media platform and not to rely on traditional media to do that job. I encouraged them to start slow and expand their municipalities' online presence over time. I suggested that each of them see if they could carve out five minutes a week to put together a regular series of YouTube videos on what is going on in their city, what's coming across their desk or what's next on the coming city commission agenda. The Post took a lot of heat about their editorial stands on some issues - like red light cameras and the inspector general.

Anyway, it was neat to be part of this panel and perhaps more Palm Beach County municipalities will be adopting and adapting various forms of social media - including Lake Worth.

That's Carey O'Donnell on the left, who served as moderator for the panel, Mark Easton, Yours Truly, Willie Howard and Andrew Marra. Those are cans of Spam Lite that were supplied by Mr. Bornstein as favors for being on the panel. Its meaning is enigmatic.