Tweet, tweet! We're on Twitter

By Jason King
Assistant Communications Director

The NCACC has joined the Twitter craze.

Using the popular social networking message service, the NCACC (twitter.com/ncacc) is posting updates on legislation of interest to counties and county-specific developments on funding opportunities through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (federal stimulus). The frequent and timely updates make it easy for county officials to learn about the latest developments in these areas.

“Tweets” are required to be short – 140 characters maximum per post – but each one includes a link to the NCACC Web site, where viewers can receive more information via the Legislation of Interest to County Officials or Information on Federal Stimulus pages that are located along the right-hand rail of the www.ncacc.org Web site.

No Twitter account is necessary in order to view updates; the page is accessible to anyone. Those with Twitter accounts can become a “follower” of the page and have updates post to their personal Twitter home page. Anyone can sign up to receive an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed of updates, and users can set up the feed to push updates directly to their e-mail inbox.

In addition, the NCACC has implemented an RSS feed for a handful of pages on www.ncacc.org: the aforementioned legislation and stimulus pages, as well as the Career Opportunities and Calendar of Events pages. All pages that have an RSS feed are designated as such with the orange RSS icon.

The new online services are the result of a strategic goals team initiative to help educate and inform county officials on advocacy issues. The strategy is a part of the larger goal of “enhancing the ability of county officials to represent counties and the NCACC on local, statewide and national issues.”

In addition to Twitter, the goals team is examining potential NCACC uses for other social networking sites such as Facebook.

Several North Carolina counties, including Catawba, Durham, Guilford, Mecklenburg and Wake, are making use of various social media Web sites, including Twitter and Facebook, to inform the public about county services.

The goals team’s discussions also generated an idea to share digital photos taken at NCACC-hosted events, such as Annual Conference and County Assembly Day, via a photo sharing service. Through Google and Picasa, the NCACC will make high-resolution versions of digital photos available to county officials to view, download or order prints.

Event attendees will receive an e-mail invitation from the NCACC to view the Web-based album. In order to download a high-resolution version of an image, users must download and install Picasa’s free software. Users are given the option of ordering prints of selected photos through a handful of supporting vendors.