Massachusetts: The Why of social media  Thursday - 7/8/2010,
3:53pm EDT  The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is heavily
involved with social media. They tweet, blog, friend and follow.
They have 10 blogs that received over 58,000 hits in the month
of May. They have 26 agencies on Twitter, 10 agencies on YouTube
and 7 on Flickr. They have toolkits that help agencies jump
right in and get started.  Still, some ask why are they focusing
on social media. The short answer: because it works.  Some of
their biggest social media successes are in the area of
emergency messaging. During the catastrophic flooding in March,
the Commonwealth Conversations: Transportation blog received
over 79,000 hits.That is five times their normal traffic!
Citizens were turning to social media - the DOT blog and Twitter
- to learn about road and transportation outages. MassDOT
created an integrated communications strategy by sending tweets
about blog updates - and even more tweets about conditions as
they changed.