It was work that originally led me to sign up for Twitter and other social media platforms. For a number of years, social media became my work. Even when I retired, I was still managing the company’s social media platforms.
From 2003 to 2004, I spent nine months working in communications for St. Louis Public Schools, which was in dire straits. Enrollment had declined to an official 40,000 from a peak of about 100,000, and the district was still operating school buildings, a headquarters building, and an administrative staff that supported a 100,000 enrollment. A management firm was hired by a reform school board to take over and do the painful stuff that had to be done. The management firm was in place all of two days when it discovered that the district was bankrupt.
The firm wielded the ax. School buildings were closed. The central administration was slashed to the bone, and even some of the bone was removed. The communications staff was reduced from 13 positions to one half of a person.
I was hired at the tail end of the staff reductions, but more turmoil was ahead. The total communications budget was $20,000 (down from $1 million), and it had been spent by the time I arrived in October. We had a web site in dire need of overhaul. We had constituencies that had to be communicated with. Protests were daily. I wasn’t in my office five minutes when I was informed that the media had gathered, waiting for a statement on the wildcat teacher sickout. (Fifteen minutes after that, I was making a statement in front of the assembled reporters from newspapers, television, and radio.)
We did the only thing we knew to do. We went electronic, including a variety of email newsletters. They were designed carefully and with a lot of forethought. In fact, given how intensely disliked the management firm was, we prominently displayed “Not for External Distribution” at the top of the newsletter for administrative staff and school principals, knowing full well that it would be immediately forwarded to news media, friends, protest groups, and everyone else. It might have been one of the most effective communication tools the district had at the time – the internal newsletter we hoped everyone would leak.
This was the time when I discovered message boards and other kinds of communication tools that were being used by people opposed to what the district was doing (leaking worked both ways).
Totally unrelated to what we were dealing with was a student up at Harvard who was setting up a dating site called Facebook. And a guy born and raised in the St. Louis area was working on a micro-media tool that eventually became Twitter.
I went back to the corporate world which, I discovered, was unaware of the existence of electronic communications outside pre-approved programs blessed by the IT department. I’d been hired specifically to deal with a bankruptcy issue affecting the company, but questions were arising about what people could see was happening online. When our department boss asked at a staff meeting if anyone knew what a blog was, people looked at each and shook their heads. I was more than familiar with what they were because of my experience with the school district. I explained what I knew. I became the immediate in-house expert.
Twitter launched in 2006, and I held off signing up until I could see what implications it might have for the company. In 2008, I signed up, embarking on the wild roller coaster ride that social media had already become. I joined Facebook a week later, and not long after I started my own blog, in addition to one for the company.
Next week: A Year Away from Twitter / X
Top photograph by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash. Used with permission.
