Old School Strategies for Outreach and Communication

"The chances for achieving meaningful results for a controversial project are inversely proportional to the degree to which the client expects help from web-enabled social networking," argues Ben Brown.

"Counting on Twitter, Facebook and all the other web-enabled applications to do the heavy lifting of consensus-building is an act of desperation. As every PR pro knows, most issues clients think of as communications problems are really management problems. Or more precisely: Getting-stuff-done problems. There’s a gap between what customers or citizens are encouraged to expect and what they see a company or government delivering. The wider the gap, the higher the levels of distrust and cynicism and the tougher the 'communication problem.'"

Brown goes on with a must-read article for planners seeking to use social media to engage with the public.