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5.
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| INTERNAL OPERATIONS COMMITTEE |
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| Information |
| Referral History: |
| On June 26, 2012, the Board of Supervisors referred to the IOC the potential development of a policy governing the use of social media by County departments. The County Administrator’s Office assigned the Office of Communications and Media (OCM) with the task of researching this issue and providing information to the IOC. The IOC began studying the issue in August 13, 2012 and received periodic updates over the subsequent 18 months, during which time work on the policy had to be tabled for several months due to other emerging priorities. The policy was completed and approved by the Board of Supervisors on June 17, 2014, with direction to the Communications and Media Director to work with the County Counsel and Risk Manager to prepare social media site usage guidelines, terms of use disclaimers, an online toolkit, and staff training curriculum, and to report back to the Internal Operations Committee on the status of these efforts. |
| Referral Update: |
OCM has extensively researched best practices in implementing social media policies, and is developing an intranet-based website that will provide County social media administrators with the guidelines for use of the primary social media tools being utilized by various staff. Those include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr and Google+.
Risk Management is helping OCM to develop and host custom web-based training for all account administrators. County Counsel has agreed to incorporate key legal points into the Public Records Act training sessions.
A registration process has been designed, mirroring the federal government registry, which will enable OCM to have a central repository of all official County social media accounts, including contact information for the account administrators and backups. Current accounts will be grandfathered-in; however, new accounts will need to be requested through OCM.
An inventory is being taken to determine how many accounts have been established, and how many are considered verified by those social media entities that provide for government account authentication. From a public perspective, it is difficult to know currently which County departments and offices use social media. A “landing page” on the County website has been created, but not yet published, with links to all genuine County accounts. It is important for the public to have a "one-stop shop" where they can find all legitimate County accounts, rather than have to guess which are genuine and which are not. OCM will work with County social media administrators to obtain verification for tools that offer them, particularly Twitter and Facebook, as those are easy targets for imposter accounts. |
| Recommendation(s)/Next Step(s): |
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At the time of the policy development, whether or not to archive county social media content was left undetermined, as there was little consensus as to whether or not it was necessary, and how that it could be done. Over the past year, it has become accepted that government social media content is, in fact, an electronic public record, subject to records requests. Many agencies have created manual processes to capture their own posts and accompanying comments, and retain them per their records retention schedules. However, manual captures are not searchable, and make responding to records requests difficult. Several vendors have developed low-cost tools to archive social media records, and make them available to government agencies. OCM recommends that the County contract with one of those services to ensure we have access to the records when we need them.
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We are also recommending that analysis of metrics be handled at an enterprise level, utilizing tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck and Sprout Social. While social media outreach has significant value, it can also be very time-consuming, and it is important to know which efforts are paying off in terms of actual engagement. Facebook “likes” and Twitter “followers” are numbers that are largely irrelevant now compared to when those tools were new. Analytics will help County social media administrators focus limited resources where they have the biggest payoff. Managing these accounts from a countywide perspective rather than by department or office will be most cost-effective.
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| Fiscal Impact (if any): |
| Utilizing a social media archive service and analytics tool would have annual costs typically less than $25,000 for both if managed at an enterprise level. |
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