Michael McCarthy, APR

Just had Dave Grobleski, one of the creators of Tweet3po, assist us with a social media for neighborhoods workshop.
His Orlando neighborhood has really shown that posting the Police calls out to a twitter account so neighbors are made aware of what is going on in their neighborhood and using Facebook to share similar crime related incidents and…[Read more]

We have moved most of our videos to YouTube. It is easy for us to place them in our site and easy for us and our partners to share on social media channels. This has so far avoided the issue of people not having the correct player installed on their machine. You would want to set up a government channel with YouTube, as that would

Denise gave the same recommendation I would with YouTube – but if you have a problem with them being able to download from YouTube, you could purchase an FTP service like “YouSendIt” for a few months and let people donwload it from there.

We’ve had some success with using employee-based teams to get out the word. For instance, for our wellness program and workplace giving campaigns, we have committees with at least one person from each department on them – and they individually communicate the message of events, programs back to their department. This works very well for…[Read more]

We have this wording,
“City elected officials shall not engage in on-line discussions concerning matters which may come before them for City Council action.”
Because n Florida, by having a conversation on Facebook, they are not providing advance notice of a public meeting – or so is the interpretation by many lawyers here.
There’s also the…[Read more]

When someone notifies us of a death of an employee or a former employee, we post it on our “Notices of the Day”, which is a sidebar on the home page of our intranet. We usually just provide information on the services and if the family has designated a place to send donations in lieu of flowers.
This is a very informal process, especially…[Read more]

Thanks for posting about this interesting opportunity.
Any opportunity for residents to make their voices known is great. In Orlando, we did a similar Q&A format for Mayor Buddy Dyer’s State of the City Address – you can see a replay of it at http://youtu.be/C1ZSDOmgNYs and a shorter promo at http://youtu.be/H3MspCqFW3I .
Having the Mayor…[Read more]

At the city of Orlando, we have an alert system for employees that allows them to get messages to email, blackberry, text to cell phones or their pager. This is primarily used for messages from our Emergency Manager to members of the various Emergency Support Functions, and includes tropical updates and activation notices. It is not used at this…[Read more]

Interesting use of Google Docs. If you are doing a large survey, Survey Monkey’s automatic calculations of the results may be worth while. It just depends on how much of an Excel/Google Spreadsheet person you are.

Hmmm, . . I see a Google April Fools Day joke showiing snow in Florida.

Dan Kleman, the former City Manager of Tallahassee, Florida, used the Athenian Oath as an example of how we should serve our City as employees. It’s been better than any mission statement I have seen since.
We will never bring disgrace on this our City by an act of dishonesty or cowardice.
We will fight for the ideals and Sacred Things of the…[Read more]