The General Assembly's winter break was just hours away, and House members still could not agree on whether to fund the controversial expansion of Route 301 in Middletown. Many were reluctant to vote on a complex project they didn’t fully understand.
So Representative Tom Kovach whipped out his cell phone and tweeted.
“it is critical to have a better understanding of funding issues surrounding rt. 301 expansion efforts,” he typed to his Twitter followers. Minutes later a follower texted him back, suggesting questions that Rep. Kovach could ask the secretary of transportation to get the information he needed to vote on the bill.
“I could have tried to text everyone, but there wasn’t time," said Kovach (R-Brandywine Hundred), an enthusiastic convert to social media. "Using Twitter, somebody picked it up and got back to me within the hour.”
From the Governor, to legislators, to state agencies, Delaware government is discovering online social media—Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and scores of others.
For officeholders, the attraction is natural. What politician wouldn't want to be “friended” or “liked” on Facebook and “followed” on Twitter? But more than a venue for vanity, these websites are becoming a valuable tool for public discourse.
Facebook claims more than 500 million users; Twitter, 105 million. Those are numbers government officials can’t ignore. And Delaware, with its few degrees of separation among residents, is seizing the opportunity—in some ways more than its larger neighbors. (See Delaware In Fact.)
Kovach's strategic use of social media began in January. He tweeted for 5 to 10 minutes each legislative day. Now, 225 people follow him on Twitter.
(For the uninitiated, "tweets" are text messages of a maximum of 140 characters. A person's tweets are visible to everyone who signs up to "follow" that person on Twitter's website. Followers can number into the millions, if you're, say, a president or a pundit. Facebook and similar sites invite people to connect by becoming "friends" or "liking" someone's posts and pages.)
For officeholders like Kovach and for an increasing number of state agencies, social media offers an economical and expeditious way to disseminate messages and engage a broad audience—unfiltered by news media outlets. Kovach says citizens benefit from the direct contact as well.
“Twitter is a way that people can get the information from the sources they’re interested in,” he said.
A potential advantage and disadvantage of participating in social media is that tweets and postings get passed around the internet—a phenomenon that can become like a digital version of the whisper game. Kovach admits he worries his message will get twisted as it makes its way around the Web, but he believes the opportunity to engage his constituents is too good to pass up.
“I would rather control the source of the material than be fearful and not put anything out there,” he said. “It’s worth the risk. If there’s ever a challenge of what I said or when I said it . . . there’s now a permanent record of what I said and when I said it. Getting info out there reduces that risk instead of increasing it.”
Representative Pete Schwartzkopf (D-Rehoboth Beach) has two Facebook pages: a personal page with 348 friends and a legislative page with 550 fans.
Rep. Schwartzkopf realized the value of social media when a local paper forgot to run an item on his announcement for reelection. Schwartzkopf posted the time, date, and location of the announcement on his Facebook page. “We had 240 people show up,” he said.
But the House majority leader says he's particular about whom he connects with on Facebook.
“You always have to be somewhat leery when you’re dealing online with people,” said Schwartzkopf, a former state police commander. “Most of the people on my Facebook page I know.”
He’s also careful about what he says. “I have one motto I live by: I’m not posting anything that I don’t want to read on the front page of a newspaper,” he said. “There’s an inherent danger of feeling too comfortable, so that you might do or say things that you should not or would not want anyone to say or do.”
That caution applies equally when officeholders, and their challengers, run for election. (See accompanying story.)
Despite the potential hazards, the State of Delaware has starting using social media to disseminate its message, slowly and strategically ramping up its online presence this year.
Felicia Pullam, communications officer for Governor Jack Markell, is at the front line of that effort. “Since Governor Markell took office, we’ve been working closely with the Government Information Center and agency teams to increase the accessibility of information to Delawareans, including through social media,” she said.
To date, the state’s Facebook page is “liked” by over 10,500 people. Pullam says the state aims to create a message that will draw even more “friends."
Not everyone who "likes" a page or becomes a "friend" is indeed a friend. Some "friends" or "followers" just want to keep an eye on others, whether they are friends or foes. Still, the state's mission is outreach to as many citizens as possible—in all demographics.
“Many people think of social media as something for young people," Pullam said. "But many of those who engage with us through Twitter and Facebook are older, including plenty of middle-aged people and lots of grandparents. Most of the people who engage with the State of Delaware through Facebook are Delawareans, but we have also been able to reach people in nearby states, as well as in other countries.”
Reaching a broad audience has created some challenges for the state employees tasked with keeping Delawareans in the know.
“There is a sense of immediacy with social media, so keeping the information fresh and pertinent is much harder than with a simple web page,” said Pullam. Updating all of the various channels of communication—press releases, web pages, Twitter, Facebook and agency social media sites—at the same time with the same information requires better coordination, she adds.
Much of that coordination has come from the Government Information Center, which monitors and comments on the official State of Delaware accounts, said Pullam.
The state’s increased online visibility also means fielding the additional load of constituent questions that come through social media.
“We believe this shows that our efforts are making government more accessible to more people, and that is exactly what we hoped to accomplish,” Pullam said. “Ultimately, we believe that this increased information flow will make government more efficient and effective.”
But some media experts fear that the space restrictions imposed by social media cause leaders to weaken and oversimplify their messages.
Andrea Hickerson is an assistant professor of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. who specialized in political communication research. She says the new avenues of communication are valuable to government agencies and politicians. She cautions, though, that social media are not a step toward transparency. They produce a “dumbing down of positions and a lack of depth” while giving the “appearance of highly involved or engaged, substantive posts.”
Social media also are not bound by the journalistic imperative to provide balance and minimize bias. So “if you’re a Democrat you just get that information. You are self-selecting your news, assembling our own headlines based on our own interest,” Hickerson explained.
“You only see what you chose to see.”