4: ENGAGEMENT

Other Information:

The ways through which New Yorkers communicate, find information and connect with friends and family are changing rapidly as a result of the explosive growth of social media. In order to serve and inform New Yorkers in a way that is accessible, convenient and rewarding, the City of New York is committed to enhancing its digital media presence, from NYC.gov to social media. Fueled by enthusiastic agency engagement, the City's social media reach has expanded to over 2.4 million followers across more than 280 channels, including existing channels such as Facebook, Twitter and iOS apps and new adoptions of Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Soundcloud, Tumblr and the Android mobile operating system. The public success of the City's digital media e¤orts has been recognized over the past year by several awards and studies, including New York City's first time ranking as No. 1 for civic engagement online by the University of Chicago at Illinois and O'Reilly Media's GovFresh City of the Year award1 . The Webby Awards presented Mayor Bloomberg with a Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement. And at this year's Shorty Awards, the Mayor was honored by Dennis Crowley with the "Foursquare Mayor of the Year" Award. Other City agencies won awards in social media including the FDNY, which won a Shorty Award for the #LifeSavingHero category. The Department of Transportation's Daily Pothole Tumblr was named one of "The 100 Best Tumblrs of All Time" by Complex Magazine while NYC & Company received a Webby Award in the tourism website category. ENGAGE NYC: SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMIT FOR CITY GOVERNMENT -- Guided by SMART, the City hosted Engage NYC, its first annual social media summit, in September 2011. Held at the Paley Center for Media, the event welcomed over 100 people from across City government and featured presentations and strategic training on how to effectively use social media platforms to engage, inform and serve New Yorkers. The morning kicked off with inspiring remarks by Deputy Mayor for Government Affairs and Communications Howard Wolfson and a surprise visit by Mayor Bloomberg, energizing the audience and conveying the importance of social media to the City's communications strategy. Throughout the event, representatives from social media platforms including Bit.ly, Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr and Twitter answered questions and presented best practices for leveraging their tools. Next Steps for Engagement -- The City of New York's digital media audience has doubled over the past year thanks to the strategic efforts of agency social media managers, and the launch of the central NYC Gov channels in February 2012. In addition, the City was ranked #1 in a national study of digital engagement performed by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Plans for digital media engagement add to these achievements with steps to overhaul New York City's website and programs to leverage social media in emergency scenarios.

Stakeholder(s):

• New York Public Library: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY -- Digitization of Historical Documents Today libraries serve a crucial role in connecting the public to information online and offline, and thanks to upcoming developments, their scope will expand dramatically. Thousands of historical documents, including handwritten material by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and papers from authors such as Mark Twain, will soon be accessible to the public online, thanks in large part to a generous gift of $500,000 from The Polonsky Foundation to the New York Public Library. The project, which began in January 2012, and continues through 2014, will digitize approximately 11,000 manuscripts from the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, located within the Manuscripts and Archives Division, and almost all the papers of several major American authors in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library. The Emmet Collection documents the founding and early years of the United States—the move toward independence, the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the federal government. The Berg Collection's holdings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman will also all be digitized. An estimated 35,000 pages will be scheduled for digitization beginning in January 2013 and will be made available through the Library's website.


• Brooklyn Public Library: THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY -- In addition, in 2013, the Brooklyn Public Library will open the Leon Levy Information Commons, a physical space with powerful digital infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of library users. The facility will be a flexible, technology-rich center offering a 30-seat wireless training space; seven private meeting rooms featuring electronic whiteboards; bar-style seating for laptop users; 25 PCs featuring standard software and advanced editing programs; and a help desk providing reference and information services and on-demand training. This groundbreaking new space will further enable patrons to exchange ideas, learn new skills and access information in a digital context.

Objective(s):

4.1: 311 Online

4.1.1: Self Service

4.1.2: Customer Channels

4.1.3: Social Media

4.2: bit.ly url Redirection Service

4.3: Facebook Presence

4.4: @NYCgov

4.4.1: @nycgob

4.5: New York City Tumblr

4.6: Foursquare Badge

4.7: Crowdsourcing Tools

4.8: Digital Citizen Toolkits

4.9: SMART

4.10: Listening Sessions

4.11: NYC.gov

4.11.1: Usability

4.11.2: Engagement

4.11.3: Accessibility

Content