Department For Family, Education And Young People Of The Municipality Of Rome: Reduction Of Distance Between Institutions And Youth

As part of the strategies and objectives of the Department’s online communication projects, a YouTube channel and a Facebook group called “Roma Capitale dei Giovani” were added to web communication channels of the Department and to Twitter. Although the two services have many features in common, we did not operate from the point of view of a duplication of content but of a choice linked to the need to offer two complementary communication channels to organically modulate both the information and the interaction with young people.

The YouTube channel was created as videos are the first and most specific form of web 2.0 social communication due to their ability to transmit large amounts of information in an immediate and synthetic way and to aggregate and make commonly accessible to the target of reference films and press report aimed at informing, clarifying and generating interest and involvement in the activities, initiatives and projects promoted and developed by the Department.

The interaction function between Administration and users and just between users has been peculiarly delegated to Facebook. The choice to create a “group” as an alternative to a “page” was carried out taking into account that, as the pages being indexed on search engines facilitate the speed of spreading of the contents, they serve to a predominantly static communication model and in any case not multi-directional, while the groups being real “communities” offer members a wide range of possibilities of interaction both among themselves and with the Administration.

In relation to the basic communication function of the initiatives promoted by the Department, using the two Web 2.0 tools in a cross-media perspective, the so-called viral load was triggered. The strategy of dissemination of communications adopted in the structuring of the Facebook group, aimed not only at supporting active participation through comments, exchange of opinions, photos and videos but also at creating interaction between Administration and users, has allowed us to fully monitor the virality of the news, not only the basic act of voting on a content with a “Like” or that of sharing it, but, above all, that of commenting on it.

The opportunity to post freely on the “wall” not only proposals but also critical comments to the initiatives undertaken by the Administration, requiring an ongoing commitment in terms of moderation of contents and management of requests for information, has led to the structuring of a system of alert redirects to allow managers and interested parties to be alerted in real time to interaction with the media and to filter and manage the contents both in a coordinated and autonomous way.

The media impact of the initiatives undertaken by the Department was subjected to a constant assessment both from a purely statistical point of view using Google Analytics, and with analysis tools that allow to evaluate the return in term of image the interactions between information and the audience such as FacebookInsight and YouTubeInsight reports.