Helping from the Web

by Sam Koller

As social media becomes an increasingly important tool for people to get information, many local governments are facing a growing challenge to stay in touch with their constituents. Here’s the story of how one student worked with the City of Morris, Minnesota to address the challenge.

My name is Sam Koller. I’m a Communications, Media, and Rhetoric graduating senior of the class of 2019, and I hope to work on social media as a career. I came to work for the Center for Small Towns through a recommendation of a friend of mine, Kurt Schliep, who worked in admissions my junior year. He told me that a job at CST for my major was open; I decided to give it a shot.

I got the job and ended up setting up and starting management of the City of Morris official Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram pages. There was a lot of work involved in the planning and setup. I created, what is essentially, a guide to setup and manage social media in the form of lots of notes. I did this over the summer and transitioned into managing the pages for the school year. This involved uploading City Council meetings, and posting content on the appropriate pages, as well as taking questions from community members.

I worked with the City Manager of Morris, Blaine Hill, on this project. He was the one who told me what content I needed to be posting on what pages. My work affects the whole city; despite some citizens not following the pages, those individuals likely know someone who is and information can spread that way. The platforms are at their most useful when I post things like snow alerts, reminders of community events, and accolades that Morris has been awarded, so that more of our community can be informed as to what is going on in town.

I thought the project went great. It gave me a lot of freedom in how I could work on the tasks assigned to me, and I never felt too much pressure in getting things done. We met our goal of setting up all of the socials and starting on growing our following, and our Facebook currently has over 200 community members following and routinely reaches over 2000 people each week. It’s been heartening to see other organizations reach out to us on Twitter and Facebook and feels like we’re becoming part of an online community of Minnesota cities.

One of the main challenges was streamlining the City Council video process and updating it to be able to work with 21st century video technology. After some trial, with tech support from other helpful city workers, we managed to get a system that works in a timely fashion so that the videos can be uploaded to the Youtube and Facebook pages. Another challenge that we are in the process of overcoming is developing sufficient content that can go on our Instagram page. But, hopefully in the future there can be some dedicated content creators that can take up the mantle after I graduate.

It was great for me to be able to support my community like this, and it felt like I was making a difference in helping our community be more connected and informed. I learned how to manage a schedule, plan meetings, and make meaningful decisions about policy in a field I was experienced in, even in the presence of people older and more experienced than me. It’s a great feeling to be useful like that. When you add in the fact that this is job experience in a field that I’m interested in as a career path, I’m ever so grateful that an opportunity like this presented itself for me.