Getting tired of hearing every year from City officials, “Why is the attendance at our Veterans Day Parade so low?”

Did you even know the City of Lake Worth has
a Veterans Day Parade?

To find out more about this upcoming event
in just 33 days, see below.

And are you getting a little tired of hearing year after year how disappointed City officials and the electeds are at the low attendance on Memorial Day too? Or maybe tomorrow people will be disappointed to learn the Food Truck Invasion is tonight (after being cancelled due to Hurricane Irma last month) and missed it or will be sad to learn next Saturday that Evening on the Avenues was the previous night and missed out.

Well, it doesn’t help when the City — for some obscure reason — will not start a City of Lake Worth Facebook page. The City of Greenacres has a Facebook page and that was a great help for their residents prior to and post-Hurricane Irma.

True. The City of Lake Worth has a Twitter feed (and so does Greenacres) and those efforts performed spectacularly leading up to and following Irma. But to many in the public Twitter remains very much a mystery.

Facebook and Twitter are very, very different
means of communication.

Whereas Facebook is the “Public Square” and has been for many years now, Twitter is ideally suited for instantly getting news (or correcting/clarifying news reports) to media outlets, reporters, and other ‘newsies’ on Twitter who then share that information through other means, e.g., Facebook, TV news segments and as re-written City press releases published in the Post.

So. Does a lot of information sent out on Twitter, “make the news”? For Hurricane Irma it did, but that’s the exception and not the rule for a “Tweet” from the City.  

By using Twitter prior to and post-Hurricane Irma, the City of Lake Worth was controlling its message on Twitter. By the City of Lake Worth not having a Facebook page — an official Facebook page — the City WAS NOT controlling the message on Facebook. So anyone can post pretty much anything on Facebook and the City was conspicuously silent or used unofficial Facebook pages to communicate its message.

“But if we had a Facebook page people can write mean comments about Lake Worth.”

No, they can’t. Not if you follow the lead of Greenacres. Just simply disable the ability to make comments. It’s as simple as that.

The Rule of Thumb is: “If you don’t control your message, somebody else will.” And as far as content goes on a City of Lake Worth Facebook page:

• Date and times of upcoming City meetings.
• “Watch tomorrow’s Commission meeting Live Streaming. Learn how.”
• Hurricane and storm alerts.
• “Active Outages” in Lake Worth’s Electric Utility service area.
• “Special Events”.
• Information for water/sewer customers, like what number to call in an emergency.

Or maybe even. . .

The “City of Lake Worth Veterans Day Parade & Ceremony of Honor”:

Don’t complain about low attendance at City events when all the best tools available aren’t being used
to get the word out.