At its June 11 meeting, the Valdosta City Council honored the winners of the 2015 Social Media Contest—an educational partnership between the city and Valdosta State University to propose the best social media strategy for the city. VSU students Jasmine Kendrick, Jerrica Kelsaw, Victoria Moss Jenna Kirkpatrick, each received a certificate, an official city coin and a professional letter of recommendation from the Mayor.

Recognizing that organizations all over the world — including municipalities — are using social media to communicate with increasingly diverse and large audiences, the city’s Public Information Office began a partnership with VSU’s Social Media Theory class, taught by Dr. David Nelson. The students were divided into groups and then tasked with developing a realistic social media plan that would be graded (resulting in a large part of their class grade) and judged by the city’s Public Information Officer.

The winning team provided the Public Information Officer with innovative ideas for reaching citizens who use social media as their primary source of communication. Furthermore, the new city website proposed in the FY2016 budget will provide the updated Content Management System tools that can be used to automatically feed information and Metro Valdosta Channel 17 news videos to selected social media sites as they posted to the website.

The team’s outstanding ideas are being implemented and will significantly impact the way the local government communicates more effectively with its citizens. 

Overall, these efforts have demonstrated the city’s continued efforts to provide applicable experiences to our local university students, as well as the city’s commitment to engage all citizens in local government. For more information, contact Public Information Officer Sementha Mathews at (229) 259-3548.