Last week I attended New York Women in Communications' Social Media Week event featuring a keynote speech from Rachel Haot, Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York. Haot spoke passionately about the many initiatives that NYC was doing to promote social media and digital use from the increase of Wi-Fi in public spaces to the Made in NY initiative.
Being a New Yorker myself, I follow all the city's Twitter handles and Facebook pages, and tweet using the #NYC hashtag, but I couldn't remember the last time I really partook in anything substantial from the cities offerings, so I decided to do a little digging and see what it's all about.
Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge
- Mayor Bloomberg has launched this competition to rally urban designers to create prototypes that will imagine what the future of the city's public pay telephones will be. The challenge is to optimize the public space once their contacts expire next year. Will they be charging stations? Wi-Fi hotspots? Touch screens? We will know soon - demo day, when the top 15 prototypes are shown, will be on March 5, so expect to hear the news soon after!
- This initiative will highlight job opportunities in the city's tech community, and provide resources to tech companies starting and growing within the five boroughs.
Academy for Software Engineering
- This program will allow hundreds of students to learn coding in addition to their core curriculum to better prepare them for the digital world ahead.
Central NYC Government Social Media
- This feed includes Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare and will allow for a "one-stop shop" for New Yorkers to stay updated on the cities latest happenings. With more than 265 channels across all agencies and initiatives - this is a must for socially aware NYC dwellers.
New York is really leading the way for social media on a city wide basis in its initiatives and planned endeavors. It will be interesting to see when cities really begin using social media to promote tourism and how they will begin to play off each other. Now you all might be thinking, of course she is rooting for NYC, she is a New Yorker, but I spent some time of Trendsmap to check out how people were talking about other major cities and I compared the use of their hashtags. This is what I found.