Many of the pages have video clips and I’ve created a TTC YouTube Channel to house them all.

Each video has a description, several tags, and a link back to the specific how-to page to help drive traffic from the TTC YouTube Channel to the TTC’s site.

During the recently completed 4-day festival, I posted Northfield JuneBug Twitter updates 30 minutes prior to each performance on the upcoming act’s venue and scheduled starting time.

I also blogged photos of each musical act’s performance.

They hired me to help them get set up with a WordPress-based website and to think about how social media could be used for the variety of initiatives they were planning. Their marketing and communications firm, Neuger Communications Group, then took on the design of the website.

 
Afterwards, I had lunch next door with the staff at KAXE, Northern Community Radio, and lucked out to be there for volunteer chef Charlie Lano’s catered home-made lunch. (That’s Charlie standing to the right of Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager.)

A tip-of-the-blogger hat to Ross Williams, one of the planners/project managers for Northern Community Internet, who handled all the arrangements for my visit. (Photo is from the MN Voices UnConference,  courtesy of Marc Osten, original here.)

My presentation is based on my 2005 U.K. Civic Leadership Blogging Guide (25-page PDF). Last fall, I collaborated with Gallomanor, colleagues in the U.K.. to produce an updated version of that, a 32-page booklet (PDF) called CivicSurf.  It’s primarily oriented towards elected councilors but applicable for anyone in a leadership position.

If you’re looking for something that’ll give you a taste of what I’ll be covering in the presentation, the CivicSurf booklet would be your best bet.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a generic leadership blogging presentation, so I’m in the middle of updating it to include new examples from a variety of bloggers, many based here in Minnesota and a few from afar.

Some of my photos (click any thumbnail and then scroll through all 8 photos):

I’ve been thinking about Northfield (my hometown) area public leadership, transparency, and social media tools this week for four reasons.

1. Northfield City Adminstrator Joel Walinski has invited me to speak about civic engagement technologies for 10 minutes to the Northfield City Council next Monday at their work session.  See my previous blog posts on Locally Grown about civic engagement here, here, and here.
2. Tonight I’m going to the Northfield School District’s Key Communicator Network meeting (I blogged about this on Locally Grown here). The District has received some criticism lately for its handling of the proposed calendar changes and the SNL cancellation.
3. Tuesday, I blogged about a new book titled The School Administrator’s Guide to Blogging by Mark Stock.  
4. Last Monday’s council meeting at which the lack of trust and respect were evidently issues. See the Northfield News article, City, townships don’t see eye-to-eye on annexation.

Lots can be learned by watching how Levy uses his blog and Twitter as a public leader. For example:

• Last summer, Levy blogged about how a surgical procedure was performed on the wrong body part. Notice 1) his detailed reflection in the post after he republished the email that was sent out to all employees and the local media about the incident; and 2) the positive reaction to the handling of the incident among many of the 54 comments attached to the blog post.
• A week or so ago, he blogged about a series of staff town meetings regarding the hospital’s financial problems and the unbelievable response he’s gotten to a radical suggestion. The media picked up on the story, too. On Tuesday, he used Twitter to alert people to his blog post update on the situation.
• Yesterday, he blogged about a single employee whose actions reflect one of their strategic initiatives.

There’s a continuing stream of both good and bad news stories like these at all our Northfield area institutions that serve the public in some capacity: the city, the townships, the county, the schools, the colleges, the hospital.  And yet we rarely hear about them.  The ‘bad news’ stories too often never see the light of day. And the ‘good news’ stories are too often spun in such a way that they’re either not believable or they’re ignored. Not always, just too often IMHO.

The increasing pervasiveness of social media tools means, in part, that local leaders have less ability to keep a lid on issues of public concern. (Employee ‘leaks’ travel far and fast. Citizens with blogs pry more effectively.) So ratcheting up the transparency (along with judicious amounts of authenticity and engagement) is a smart strategy. The end result, as Levy says, is the institutions get better at what they do. And that’s what we, the public, want to see. And when we do, we’ll applaud it, thereby encouraging the virtuous cycle to continue and spread.

Mark recently had a book published titled The School Administrator’s Guide to Blogging. With my permission, he’s included some excerpts from my white paper that I published for the UK titled Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging: How to use weblogs as an effective local leadership tool.

The book just arrived but I intend to immediately loan it to Charlie Kyte, fellow Northfielder, and a blogger and podcaster (audio and video) in his role as Executive Director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA). Kyte’s blog is titled The VOICE of Minnesota Education.