Midwestern District ITE 2017 Conference Listen, Engage, and Make a Negative a Positive Presented By: Alex Carr Communications Specialist Lake County, IL Government @LakeCountyIL

Background Lake County, IL – NE part of Illinois halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee Communications Division is part of the County Administrator’s Office and we serve 21 elected board members and more than ## departments and divisions. Some of the bigger departments have a designated PIO – health department, Sheriff, and most recently LCDOT.   Our county took a long time to get started with Facebook because we were scared of negativity.                Instead of a series of general tips and guidelines, our approach to this presentation is to share some real examples that happened in our communities. Almost like mini-case studies. We hope to show you that negativity on social media is an opportunity. Instead of shying away from negativity, listen and engage with your audience. In each example we will give you practical actions you can take away.

Know How To Respond To Negativity Well, the bad news is negativity is not going away on social media. Since we are government, our typical social media audience ranges anywhere between the ages of 35 and 60. This varies for different agencies. In five years, you will be communicating to a group of new people, that have been further exposed to social media for their entire lives, AND are not afraid to express their opinion. Therefore, it’s important that you begin preparing for negativity on social media, if you haven’t done so already. Now let’s kick off with our first example, which begins with a video.

Roundabout Video This is one of our most viewed videos of ALL TIME. On Facebook alone, this video was watched almost 40,000 times, all of which were organic views, meaning we didn’t pay anything to promote it. Crazily enough, this video was created because of a negative situation. So, how did we turn a negative situation into one of our most viewed videos of all time? Brooke will explain. A couple summers ago we were in the final stage of building Lake County’s 5th roundabout. We knew there was negative sentiment about this roundabout. It was in a part of the county that hadn’t probably encountered our 4 other roundabouts yet – so they were knew and unfamiliar. There was also an unfortunately tough road closure required for the last month of construction. The detour route took drivers fairly far out of the way, and it put a lot of congestion on the surrounding roads sending all these extra cars there.

Before The Roundabout Opened… We were prepared for negative comments. LCDOT would be monitoring the Facebook page for the next few days basically non-stop. Here are a few samples from the almost 90 comments: I hate roundabouts, lol. Unsafe! Who is the idiot that approved this? Can’t wait to hear all the sirens for the idiots crashing into everything

After… What happened? Well… This audience shared the video with their friends. Sure many of them were sharing in fear “How safe can it be if we need a VIDEO to show us how to drive it?!” This post generated a great deal of buzz and conversation amplifying our reach. People were curious or nervous so they watched the video.   Reach: 100K Views: 39K Shares: 547 This video did not make people fall in love with roundabouts. But it DID generate discussions, it gave us the opportunity to address incorrect information, and most importantly – This video showed people what to expect when the roundabout opened a few days later. And once it opened, we received positive feedback – or at least didn’t hear any further negatives. “Have used the Roundabout several times at different times of the day and is working much better than I expected. Have not seen any back ups at all”

Takeaways Train your brain to see negativity as an opportunity. Repeat: It’s not your job to change opinions, it’s your job to inform. Listen for questions, even if it sounds like angry noises. Be there. Takeaways: Train your brain to see negativity as an opportunity. Repeat: It’s not your job to change opinions, it’s your job to inform. Listen for questions, even if it sounds like angry noises. Be there.

Culvert Collapse One sunny day one of our culverts had deteriorated and caved in, making one of our roads completely collapse. What did we do?

This Does Not Make Us Look Good Would any of your elected officials or administrators allow you to post pictures on social media that make you look bad? Hey look everyone, one of our roads collapsed! However, we needed to be the source of the story and we needed to act fast. We needed to get in front of the story. This was either going to totally backfire – or it was a bold move in the name of transparency.

Get In Front Of The Situation We decided to state the facts, reassure everyone that we were acting fast, reassure everyone that we would check all of the other culverts, and promise to keep the updates coming as we learn more. Instead of waiting for everyone else to “Break the story” while we spent hours trying to make sure we had every single piece of the plan in place, we decided to tell the story as it unfolded.   We posted pictures on social media, we sent out a press release, we shared the detour information… and then the phone calls started pouring in from the media. The media used our pictures, the media used our words and shared our messages. And so did our facebook friends. And so did the local communities. And it was all in the spirit of being helpful and getting the word out. This first post reached 12,570 people after being shared 99 times. Comments we heard were along the lines of “thankfully nobody was hurt” and “oh so that is why traffic was backed up, thanks for the information” Ultimately we had to trust our audience. Had we built up enough trust in advance of this? Would they see this as informative and transparent? Or would this open us up to criticism and cynical comments about road conditions and tax money and “What are we waiting for someone to die before we fix things?!” People could have shared our pictures in a “can you believe this?!” fashion. But they didn’t.

Takeaways Be transparent Be the source Trust your audience Continue to provide information, even when the news isn’t good Don’t leave room for rumors and misinformation to spread Takeaways: Be transparent Be the source Trust your audience Continue to provide information, even when the news isn’t good Don’t leave room for rumors and misinformation to spread