Latest / Modern Gov Matters / Doing Social Media Like a Human with Tom Christensen
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- Tom: I try to tell people that the more you put real people out there and real faces out there, people start to realize that the government is just your neighbors. We're part of the community, we're the same people that you run into at the grocery store it starts to eliminate some of that wall between you and government when you realize. it's just people doing their job, trying to make the community a better place. Sarah Loyd: Welcome to Modern Gov Matters. I'm Sarah Loyd, and this show is all about honest conversations with public sector communicators about what's actually working, what's not, and the stuff that keeps you up at night. Modern Gov Matters is presented by CivAll, powered by Social News Desk. Tom Christensen has spent nearly 30 years in government communications, and for the last two decades, he's been doing something most agencies would consider impossible. Managing more than 100 social media accounts for San Diego County, one of the largest counties in the country. He's a CAPIO Award winner, past president of the organization, and one of the most watched voices in California government comms. And spoiler, he's also a self-described introvert. So welcome to Modern Gov Matters, Tom. Tom: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, happy to have you. So before we get into the big stuff, you just wrapped up your term as CAPIO president. so what does it feel like to hand that off and what are you most proud of from that chapter? Tom: CAPIO is such a great organization. we have almost twelve hundred members across the state of California, and that has continued to grow. sometimes I just kind of shake my head and wonder where all these communicators are coming from. but that's a great thing. and it's a great thing that they're choosing to join CAPIO. CAPIO is just such a great unified voice for communicators. It's such a great resource for people to share ideas and network. Our annual conference also keeps growing. throughout my tenure with CAPIO in different board positions and stuff, I think the conference is by far the greatest accomplishment. we have a a committee, you know, obviously that puts that on. and When I very first started with CAPIO, there was like the you'd have two hundred and fifty, three hundred people at the conference and now we're up to like eight hundred people. Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Tom: so that to me, I mean just just h being able to be a part of that growth and helping the the whole organization is probably the best achievement. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that's amazing. And so now you're back to just a hundred social media accounts, no big deal. And your official title is communications specialist. but before Tom: Yes. Sarah Loyd: the show you described your role as helping keep the public informed about services, events, and programs. So what does that actually look like on, say, an average Tuesday? Tom: you know, I it's like you say, it's different every day. get a lot of requests from different departments. the way we operate here is we have the main county accounts. those are the ones that I have a hands on role and posting every day to. and then we have various departments that have accounts. We have parks that have accounts, libraries that have accounts. And those things I just have kind of a general oversight over. one of those where you just let kind of run themselves, the people running them and you just kinda watch over their shoulders so to speak and say like, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't quite look right or noting if there's anything, you know, that goes awry or amiss. but it's a lot of, you know, we have a lot of events going on. the trick is to try to get people to not necessarily notice it's a message from the government. and try to make it just blend in with the rest of the social media out there. So I always tell people To do social media like you do social media, not you as the government, but you as a person. Like if you're, a mother take yourself out of your government role, put back on your mother hat and think, you know, how do I do you look at Instagram? What do you like on Instagram? do you not use X? different things like that, and try to put it in that perspective of how you consume social media because that's how the public and everybody else consume social media and not get so wrapped up in your role, you know, working for the government. And that that I think you build a stronger connection that way. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, I love that. That's great advice. you know, having people kind of put on the if I were the audience hat, you know, what what would I want to consume? I think that's a really helpful way to think about social. So Tom, when you were coming up in this field, as a newspaper reporter, a radio host, a legislate legislative comms director in Minnesota, did you ever imagine that you'd end up deep in government social media? Was this ever a path that you saw coming? Tom: No, because well, for one, the simple fact that it was so long ago we didn't have social media back then. Sarah Loyd: I I remember. Tom: so yeah. So actually the the birth of social media as it were occurred right about the time I came to San Diego. I'd only been here I think maybe a year, year and a half before we started opening up social media accounts. So in that regard, no. I didn't foresee you know where we're at today, but it's a great evolution. it's so much easier to get somebody to pay attention to your post online than it is to get them to either pick up some form of media and see your, you know, press release or to come to your website and look at a story that you posted or something. I mean it makes it a lot more accessible for the public and it helps, you know, it's easier to get your message out that way. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, for sure. And you also mentioned something before the show that I want to unpack a little bit. You said that you've seen a noticeable shift back to Facebook over the past year. talk me through that because I think a lot of communicators have been told that Facebook is dying for for years now. Tom: I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it's it's very pronounced. It's it's been very dramatic the shift back to Facebook. Our Facebook follower account is growing robustly every month. I think one of the the tricks, and I think most people know this trick, is you know, when you put the link in the comments instead of in your post, it really helps the engagement and they're not joking around with that. ever since we started consistently doing that, we've seen this dramatic shift. in the engagement levels on Facebook and you know everybody was go to Instagram, go to Instagram and Instagram is still great and it'll flip sometimes but we'll have videos that'll do, you know, twenty, thirty, forty thousand views on Facebook and they'll do ten or fifteen thousand views on Instagram. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, interesting. Tom: So I'm not really sure what totally accounts for that shift, but it's very dramatic. And in speaking to some of our other people in the in our county that do social media on their pages, they're seeing the same thing. There's really been kind of a more dramatic move back to Facebook. So I'm I'm not really sure because like I said, I used to always joke around that Facebook was, you know, where grandmas went to check in on their grandkids. But now it's it's very robust Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that's great to hear. And so speaking of engagement, talk about X a little bit. You have a large following there, but you told me that the casual engagement is basically gone. So what do you do with a platform where the audience is still there, but they've kind of gone quiet? Tom: One of the nice things about social media these days, and I know there's people that will tell you, you know, don't post the same thing on different platforms and make your content unique, which is great advice, but Whereas you have something like X that's seeing a little bit less engagement, it's always nice when you use, you know, a posting platform where you could just click the button and post to all the different platforms. And so, I mean, I tell people just keep up your presence on X. I mean, you you maybe don't have to go through quite the extra effort that you used to to make things unique for X and that sort of thing, but don't completely abandon the platform because for one thing, when there's an emergency happening or some big news, people still go to X. They don't necessarily like X, but they know that it's real time. And ironically, we just saw a fairly good bump in X engagement last month. Again, I don't know Sarah Loyd: interesting. Tom: why it had been declining, declining, declining, but last month it it rose back up. we have about we're just under 170,000 followers on there. And we had been seeing where videos were getting, you know, a hundred views or things like that, Sarah Loyd: well. Tom: but now they went back up into the couple thousands last month for some reason. So I don't know. You never know what Elon's doing with, you know, the algorithm Sarah Loyd: Ha Tom: and that sort of thing with X, so Sarah Loyd: Yeah, al always pulling the strings. So speaking of video, you said you've been leaning into vertical video and trending content, and you said it's driven huge growth in video views. So what made you decide to go in that direction? And was there any kind of internal resistance? Like did anyone say we're a county government, we don't do trending content? Tom: there was some like This is still kind of new to us and when you post those kind of videos, you have to be able to accept that there are going to be a few people out there that don't like it that we'll post something and be like, my gosh, you're the government, why are you posting this? Sarah Loyd: Ha ha. Tom: we haven't had that too much, but as I'm looking through trends with other people and following other people around there, I'll see I I can't remember the city, but I think it was in Texas where they posted something and people just came for them like you're using taxpayer dollars to do this video, you're doing you know, this on our government time and they actually had other cities in Texas come and post on there and defend So I really like that. you know, sticking up for your fellow communicators like that. Yeah, Sarah Loyd: We're we're tight in Texas. Tom: well he exactly. but you had to just go, you know, and you of course you have to find people that are willing to be in the videos and to do these things. So we've taken a a fairly cautious approach here it still has to have that message and it still has to have, you know, a value to it for the public in order to do it. And so I had seen a video from Arizona where they had done a hiking safety video for hiking in the heat. And they had done it with firefighters. So I took that and we did it with park rangers because naturally parks Sarah Loyd: That makes sense. Tom: where you go hiking. Yeah. So they the our parks department found me three rangers and two of us went out to a park. Spent only like half an hour. we put it with the Megan Trainor song where you do the no no no and it was like, you know, no hiking Sarah Loyd: Ha ha Tom: without water, no hiking in the That sort of thing and it just blew up on social media. People really liked it. we have a Ranger who's he's just this tremendous guy and he's always out doing programs with The public and with kids and stuff. And we have photos of him like with a snake wrapped around his Ranger hat and all these different Sarah Loyd: Ha ha Tom: things. His name's name is Ranger Kyle. And there were so many comments on that post of like, my god, Ranger Kyle, we love Kyle. We love and so that's my whole whole point about like being authentic and making that connection with the public. I mean, it's you know, you're not using something AI generated or you're not not using stock photo and when you put the real people out there that people know and can relate to it the message you know resonates even more. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you're kind of building this like stable of stars, you know, for your social media posts. And you know, it almost kind of makes it like a series or like a regular cast of characters that people, you know, really kind of latch on to, like Ranger Kyle. and I'm gonna throw you a little bit of a curveball here, but how do you engage your staff to want to be in these videos? And you know, I'm sure once you find folks who do, you you hang on to them and keep them in the in the pack. But how do you how do you go about finding them initially? Tom: it's kind of just the people you know within your organization and you can kind of tell like you said earlier which and I'm an introvert. It's so but you have to find those people who aren't. and sometimes you just have to convince them and sometimes you have to, you know, you can bribe with a baked good or something. but generally speaking you can get people, As long as they trust you and they know that you're not gonna put them in a position where they look bad, they're usually pretty game to do it. you just do it till you find the people that really shine through Sarah Loyd: that's great advice for people to, you know, look, look maybe in unexpected places for those personalities that are really going to stand out. you told me that your your biggest pitch when you do presentations for CAPIO and other agencies is to be authentic. And I really love that. So tell me tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that. Cause be authentic sounds simple, but sometimes it's kind of terrifying for government communicators. Tom: Yeah, that part of that goes back to what I was saying earlier about putting on the hat of someone who consumes social media instead of looking at yourself as simply the producer of social media, and trying to make it more relatable. My big emphasis here is on using real photos, real people. when people just think of government, they always think of, you know, Scary government telling us what to do, you know, that sort of thing. And I try to tell people that the more you put real people out there and real faces out there, people start to realize that the government is just your neighbors. We're part of the community, we're the same people that you run into at the grocery store filling up your gas tank when you're out walking your dog. These are the same people. And it it it starts to eliminate some of that wall between you and government when you realize. it's just people doing their job, trying to make the community a better place. and it's easier to relate to people like that than it is to relate to the government. And so Like I said, like Kyle Ranger, for example, people see him in the parks, people see him and doing programs, and then they see him on social media and they're like, Hey, he's the county. He works for the county. Yeah. Sarah Loyd: I know that guy. Tom: Or, you know, whether it it doesn't matter whether it's someone that's, you know, patching potholes or processing a a public assistance application. Those are all real people that are out in the community too. the more you can connect people to that sort of vibe and that sort of thing. and of course, for social media, it makes your social media look like everybody else's social media, and it doesn't look like you know, the last thing you want to look like is like a business where you're like the people think it's an ad or think it's you know some sort of pitch like that. Sarah Loyd: just out of curiosity, do you guys use any kind of like professional photo or video gear, or are y'all out there like with an iPhone just you know, shooting on the fly? Tom: It it's a mix. We have a a staff of videographers. and most of them have been here several years. They're they're very, very good at what they do. but we also do shoot a lot of video on iPhones now. lot of the the videos that I shoot are on iPhone because I don't have a video background and I I would be lost trying to use some of the professional equipment. so it's nice. I mean just and it makes it so much easier to get some of the footage and stuff too. I did two videos with people from our ag weights and measures department on with prices being so high. We went out to where they test gas pumps to make sure they're accurate. And then when they go into grocery stores and make sure what the price is on the labels, what gets rung up with the register. Those are quick and easy. Just went with the iPhone, did the people in the store and out at the gas pumps. And that was another one where the guy was his name was Eddie that was doing the gas pump testing and I didn't even pitch him on he just started out with I'm Inspector Eddie and It was just great. Personality shown through with the video, but those were quick, just done with the iPhone. So we we do a mix. We have we have some very, very good professional videographers, and then we also have staff that will go out with with just their iPhone. Sarah Loyd: I love that you guys are, you know, really just taking the time to to put the work in. And I know, you know, sometimes we we talk to folks who have a smaller staff, but you know, it sounds like that really underpins the whole authenticity part of it is just, you know, shooting real video, even if it's just with your iPhone, getting the inspector Eddies and the Ranger Kyles out there in front of the camera. So that's great. so you told me that your radar right now is on AI and specifically the misinformation angle. and I think what's interesting is that you're not worried about AI as a productivity tool, but more as a trust problem. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Tom: It's frightening when you go online now and look at the content out there and what people are able to do with AI, especially video wise. I don't wanna say that people aren't necessarily smart enough to figure it out, but it's really hard because you look Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Tom: at the video and you think, my gosh, did that person just, you know, do that? I mean, and it's not just everyday stuff. They're taking video of, you know, incidents going on in your community and distorting them into to what fits their narrative. and it's really hard to combat that because we're trained to like when you see it, you tend to believe it. when those fake videos are out there, I mean it's it's a real challenge to try to convince people that what they saw wasn't real, but they saw it. And so that's that to me is one of the biggest challenges out there. I mean it's you know, when people are using AI to create a flyer or to create a whatever mean that's you know, that's just a a creative decision or whatever, but but you really have to worry about people putting narratives out there in your community that don't fit what reality is and they can so easily do it now if they have some AI skills to it. And so that as a communicator is frightening because, it's hard to to combat that. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, I was gonna ask, is there any kind of practical answer to that, or is this just one of those times where you have to be louder and faster than the bad information out there? Tom: That's probably the answer is trying to be louder and faster because I don't know. I mean, like I said, once it's out there, it's hard to to, put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. It's everywhere too. I mean that's the problem. You if you find it one place, you know, and then you look at another place and that's the cursing and the blessing of social media. Stuff spreads so quickly. And so if you don't get a handle on it or don't spot it right away, I don't know what you do. Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Yeah. And I I know we've we've talked with Will Hampton on the show before and he was really talking about building the infrastructure of trust. And I think that's probably, you know, where you guys come in, creating the content that you do, putting money in the trust bank so that, you know, people know to come back to you to get the real source of information. so you mentioned something else before the show that really stuck with me. You said that almost weekly you get a direct message from a resident saying that something you posted helped them out or solved a problem. And you also told me, you know, earlier about Ranger Kyle getting heartfelt responses and you know, not just about a program, but just about a person. So what is it about those kinds of moments that keeps you going? Tom: actually just this past week I had to send one of the messages that we got on to our behavioral health department who sent someone out to check on someone. They actually sent law enforcement to check on this person And so I was concerned and sent that along and that person got a check, a welfare check. it really is something when you can actually help someone and you know when you can connect them to a resource or something, you know, people asking you know for the whether it's food assistance or you know their grandma has this issue with her apartment building or something, you know, and just being able to help people and to genuinely help them is that gives you, you know, obviously a certain amount of satisfaction. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, that's awesome. All right, Tom, it's time for our lightning round. So quick fire, first thing that comes to mind, no wrong answers. so first up, what is your favorite local spot in San Diego County? Tom: This is gonna be kind of a selfish answer because it's part of our county, but we have the waterfront park which surrounds the building that I work in, the county administration center. what's beautiful about it is it's right on the water, right on the Bay of San Diego. it has what we call an active recreation area with pickleball and basketball courts and things like that, and then it has water jet fountains for the kids to play in, it has playground equipment. Big green lawn. and the beauty of that is it used to be two parking lots. There used to be parking Sarah Loyd: wow. Tom: lots on the side of our building, and one of our county supervisors had this vision for this park, and so they took out the parking lots, put in this park. it hosts tens of thousands of people for concerts. has a big Fourth of July celebration every year. But it's just the everyday use for people that come down here. School groups come down here from local schools and hang out. so it's just it's a it's a nice public facility that used to be a parking lot. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, it's like the reverse big yellow taxi, right? Tom: Yes. Sarah Loyd: All right, so what is the most underrated part of your community? Tom: underrated. I would have to say probably just the diversity of the cultures here. We have obviously a big Latino population. We have a very large Filipino and and Asian population. So there's just so much good food, so much good cultural events. we just have a lot of things going on we've had a lot of asylum seekers, a lot of refugees from like Somalia and some of the Middle Eastern countries and so there's pockets all over in our community of different cultures, different food. you can always find something to do and something to eat that's different and and a little bit of adventure. Sarah Loyd: if San Diego County had a theme song, what would it be? Tom: I'm gonna go local here, and go with Blink one eighty two. but I think I'm gonna say what's my age again? I think that's the exact title. Sarah Loyd: Ha ha ha. Tom: just because San Diego's kind of a place where you can be any age you wanna be. It's it's such a tourist spot and generally speaking the weather's nice here it doesn't matter if you're sixty, you wanna hop in the water and surf, you can do that. Doesn't matter, I don't think you age as much here as you do in some other places. Sarah Loyd: Yeah. Tom: So Sarah Loyd: yeah. So if you're looking for the fountain of youth, apparently it is waterfront park in in San Diego County. All right, so my last question for you, Tom. What's one piece of advice that you would give someone just starting out in government communications? Tom: You've heard me say this before, but I'm gonna go back to being authentic. don't get lost in a bureaucracy and and the whole working for government thing. maintain your connections to the public and to your community and to your family and friends. we always talked about being in the fishbowl when we worked in the legislature. It's like everything you think is happening right in here in the legislature and and I used to come into the room and be like, Well that's not what so and so my neighbor is saying or that's not what I heard when I was here and so So maintain that perspective I think is very valuable. It's something that that hopefully can shine through in your work. And like I said, that's that's what I think establishes a strong connection with your community is being authentic and being relatable to them. Sarah Loyd: That's great. Tom, the thing I'm gonna take away from this conversation is you don't have to choose between being a government communicator and being a real person online. That authenticity really is the strategy. So thank you for thirty years of making it look possible and for sharing all of this with our listeners today. Tom: Thanks for having me. Sarah Loyd: Yeah, of course. Modern Gov Matters is presented by CivAll, powered by Social News Desk. If you found this episode helpful or interesting, please share it. And for more episodes, visit moderngov matters.com. I'm Sarah Loyd and we'll see you in two weeks.