Railroads, Newspapers and GM, Oh My!

No less staid a group than the International City/County Manager's Association has discovered social networking.

ICMA's journal magazine for members is PM (Public Management). The PM October 2009 hot cover story is "Social Media: What Does it Mean for Public Managers." It's actually a trio of articles; check them out here on the magazine's web site at http://www.icma.org/pm/9109/.

The three articles are "why" articles instead of "here's how" articles. But the authors (two city managers and an ICMA intern) make the case that this newfangled social networking thing is something cities and counties (and their leaders) should be doing. The articles are short and quite dry but Ventura City Manager Rick Cole (he's on Facebook!) gets off one of the best analogies I've read in a while:

"What local governments can't do is fall hopelessly behind. The fate of railroads, automakers, and newspapers shows what happens to the complacent."

As a former daily newspaper reporter, let me just say "Ouch!"' Railroads, Cole says, failed "because they defined their business as railroading, and shunned expansion into trucking, airlines and airfrieght. While they were loyal to one mode of transportation, their customers were not."

Newspapers?  They wanted readers to wait for news until the paper hit the driveway in the morning, and access to cellphones and the Internet has left everyone under 35 unwilling to wait --and able to get insta-news online, he says. (Here goes yet another pundit ignoring the role TV news -- especially round-the-clock cable TV news -- has played in print-J's downfall...but OK he's right.)

Automakers (he didn't actually say GM but we presume he's talking American...) didn't pay attention to what buyers wanted, Cole says.

So what do we want online? INFORMATION. When do we want it? NOW.

If city and county managers are advocating getting on Facebook, having 400 friends, blogging about their work, and Tweeting municipal news releases...the entire world will be there soon.

Let me explain: city and county managers are about the most circumspect bunch on the planet, except perhaps for city attorneys and county counsels. And how do I know this?

I've been married to one since 1992. And hanging out with a bunch of them during off hours because of that. (He's retired now, which is the only reason I can write this...) It's a very odd match: The never-reveal-your-cardhand veteran municipal CEO and the ex-journalist-webbie-social-media-blogger.

Anyone who knows city/county managers knows they're starved for time and starved for re$ource$ even more than public universities. (Is that possible? Yes.) And this month, their professional journal cover story is all about why cities and counties should get on the social media/social networking train. Err, airline. Err, molecular transport beam.