by

Dave Hardin

Public Information Officer

As Catawba County works to effectively get information about services and policies to citizens, it’s always been more challenging to make contact with older children and young adults. Many people don’t begin paying close attention to what government is doing until they reach the age where they have to deal with property taxes and taxes withheld from paychecks.

The challenge of reaching younger people may now be tougher than ever because lots of folks, young and old, are getting their information in very different ways than my age group did when we were younger. The dramatic improvement in technology over the last ten years has resulted in the Blackberry-style devices that give everyone millions of choices about the information they receive.

While my generation, in our teens and early 20s, relied on relatively few television and radio stations and newspapers for information, today’s young people are utilizing the newer “social networking” sites such as MySpace or Facebook to share information. I recently attended a national conference of government communicators and heard a speaker say the traditional idea of sending out a news release to the long established media sources would be fully replaced by communicating through social networking sites within five years!

I don’t really buy into that time line but it’s clear that, if we want to communicate with younger people, we must put our message out where they will see it. Catawba County Government has created a Facebook page and using something called Twitter to try to accomplish this goal.

You may link into both from our web site at www.catawbacountync.gov. If you haven’t been on Facebook, it’s a place where people can set up a page and share information, photos and more about their lives and families. They can then reach out to friends and link them into a network, though which each friend receives the information other friends add to their individual pages.

Catawba County Government’s Facebook page is working in the same manner, but the information being shared is the latest news from the county, in short and long written form, through photos and even a few videos on such topics as Keep Catawba County Beautiful and Public Health. More videos are going to be added over time, I’m sure.

At the moment, most of the County’s Facebook friends are County employees. But each time one of us joins the Catawba County Facebook network, all of our individual friends in and out government see that we’ve joined. That’s using the power of this social network to let more and more people know Catawba County is reaching out to them with information on Facebook. We’re noticing new friends joining out network daily.

Twitter describes itself as “ a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” We’re using Twitter to send out short, one paragraph versions of our news stories, with links where people can learn more about a given story.

All of the stuff we’re sharing on Facebook and Twitter is the same thing you would also see in newspapers, hear on local radio or read on the internet. We’re just taking the information out where more people, especially our future government leaders, may see it.