Massachusetts: The Why of social media

Thursday - 7/8/2010, 3:53pm EDT

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is heavily involved with social media. They tweet, blog, friend and follow. They have 10 blogs that received over 58,000 hits in the month of May. They have 26 agencies on Twitter, 10 agencies on YouTube and 7 on Flickr. They have toolkits that help agencies jump right in and get started.

Still, some ask why are they focusing on social media. The short answer: because it works.

Some of their biggest social media successes are in the area of emergency messaging. During the catastrophic flooding in March, the Commonwealth Conversations: Transportation blog received over 79,000 hits.That is five times their normal traffic! Citizens were turning to social media - the DOT blog and Twitter - to learn about road and transportation outages. MassDOT created an integrated communications strategy by sending tweets about blog updates - and even more tweets about conditions as they changed.
