How Community Economic Development Benefits from Social Media

Community engagement and collaboration are essential to the project development process. Social media offers project owners, developers and municipalities’ new ways to engage with communities. To use social media effectively project owners must clearly lay out the project goals and identify local influencers. Influencers may include the elderly and low income residents with no access to computers or don’t understand social media. Traditional methods are used to contact these individuals. Identifying influencers with a negative opinion about a project are as important to find as those who have a positive opinion. The goal is to develop communication and collaboration best practices around projects. There are many projects that are not completed due to lack of information, sharing and transparency with the community. These projects are dead-on-arrival in planning or zoning hearing meetings.

Social Media Benefits

Community engagement and collaboration offer the following benefits in project development process:

• ID early community issues with project
• Survey and poll community
• Survey and poll community
• Greater community participation
• Neighborhood due diligence
• Track the development process
• Develop awareness
• Capture the discussion and provide a textual history

What is Social Media

Social media are internet applications that allow people to share information, interact and develop online relationships. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram and You Tube are social media websites. Personal and company websites, podcasts, forums, blogs and micro-blogs are also considered part of social media. Deciding which social media platform to use depends on which platform(s) are being used by the community. Social media is most beneficial for the planning and collaboration phase of a development project.

Developing Community Engagement and Collaboration through Social Media

Project information should be presented as news with short announcements, picture scrapbooks, videos, articles and detailed descriptions of the project milestones, project owner and project events. Social media is a great way to introduce your firm to a community where you are planning to construct a project. The social media coordinator should be familiar with running a hyper-local campaign. Remember, the goal is to develop a conversation with a few hundred stakeholders not get a few thousand followers.

A social media campaign must also discuss the project’s goals, how the community will be impacted and what the project owner expectations from community participation. Community members must feel their input is important. If the discussion is vague or the community does not get their questions answered, the owner will not get good feedback. To prevent confusion the social media campaign coordinator should also be familiar with the development process and community engagement. Vague goals and impact statements can cause misunderstandings between the community and the project. Project owners must understand that collaborating with the community is time consuming and social media must be managed.

What Are the Advantages of Engaging with Communities

In the early stages managers and developers keep project information confidential for many reasons. Losing competitive advantage and loss of negotiating power are just a few. The reason why community engagement is important is simple economics. There is nothing worst then sinking development dollars into a project that is not approved during the permitting process or requires major modifications to meet the wishes of the community. It is up to the project developer to find a middle road between the project’s goals and the community’s interests.

In conclusion, for community engagement and collaboration to work all media sources and points of contact must be used. Influencers not on social media must be in the conversation. Residents want to be involved in developments that occur in their neighborhood. This phenomenon can be seen by community participation in the project approval process, the popularity of placemaking and communities supporting local business developments through crowdfunding. As social media continues to grow the conversation will take place. Project owners, developers and municipalities have to decide if they want to be a part of the conversation.