Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures 434 Farm Lane East Lansing, MI 48824 December 6, 2012 Lansing

City Council 10th Floor- City Hall 124 W. Michigan Ave Lansing, MI 48933 Dear Lansing City Council Members: My name is Kelsey Howard and I am a Professional Writing student at Michigan State University. Along with my two Professional Writing colleagues, Zach Scott and Jackie Knudson, I have recently completed a research project to evaluate the image of Lansing through the use of social media. The purpose of our project was to understand the connection between the image that the City of Lansing projects in relation to how Lansing is perceived through the use of personal social media--specifically within the social network of Twitter. As current residents of East Lansing, we truly care about the City of Lansing as our neighbor and State capitol. We all feel strongly about the future of the city and believe that the findings in our research can help the city's image move in a positive direction. In the following report, we have detailed and customized our suggestions so that you may take this new information and begin a new cultural transition for the City of Lansing. We hope these suggestions formulated from our findings will eventually attract new businesses, residents, and visitors to revitalize and energize the city. Thank you for the opportunity to present this information and your willingness to work together to make the City of Lansing a better place. We appreciate your time and hope that our research can aid in the development of Lansing. Sincerely, Kelsey Howard Zachary Scott Jackie Knudson

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Examining Lansings Online Identity

A Look at Representations of the City on Twitter
By Kelsey Howard, Zachary Scott, and Jackie Knudson

Overview
The following report details the study we conducted on the City of Lansings social media usage from its inception to its conclusion. We set out to determine whether or not the public agrees with the images (and furthermore, the brand) Lansing is putting out though Twitter in order to determine brand effectiveness. In doing so, we discovered that the City of Lansing does not have enough of a social media presence, and therefore we also provide suggestions for possible next steps.

Project Background and Rationale

As we understand it, the city of Lansing seems to be currently undergoing a period of economic and cultural transition. Efforts are being made to revitalize in the midst of an economically trying time. In order to attract businesses, new residents, and economic activity, the city has been working to establish a new brand identity. Government and the auto industry have always been the backbone of Lansings economy, but with government offices at all levels operating on tighter and tighter budgets and the auto industry recently needing a federal bailout, Lansing seems to be forgetting its purpose. What weve seen in recent years seems to be a switch from manufacturingbased industry to creativity-based industry. In a push to encourage recent college graduates and young entrepreneurs to make Lansing their home, the city has taken big steps, such as revamping the Downtown Area and changing the adjoining Stadium District into something that wouldnt look out of place in Chicago; coffee shops, bars and restaurants line the streets around the Lugnuts Stadium, a theatre and museums are a short block away, and all the old warehouses have been converted into luxury apartments on the inside, but maintain their original facades. This isnt just happening in the downtown area though. Throughout Lansing, changes such as these can be seen, encouraging a hip, young feel that would attract a younger population while also interweaving Lansings rich history and traditions in order not to alienate the more traditional crowd. Keeping with current trends, these new brands should be largely promoted through social media, which creates a complex situation. The conversation opens; public perception of the city may be as visible as the official identity.

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Specifically, current residents may publically interact with the new city brands. Whether they embrace or reject the new identity, they will do it loudly. The citys success could ultimately rely on the participation of its residents. This project aims to examine the interplay between the citys split identities the official Lansing and the public Lansing. By doing so, we hope to gauge the effectiveness of the citys branding and evaluate its progress toward revitalization.

Situating this Research Peer City Comparisons

We feel that it is important to justify this research by looking at the social media usage of two of Lansings peer cities: Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor. Grand Rapids: On paper, Grand Rapids and Lansing appear very similar. Though Grand Rapids is slightly larger, it is comprised of nearly or exactly that of Lansing in terms of gender breakdown, median age, education, income, health and crime rates. The City of Grand Rapids puts a very big emphasis on social media usage. Clicking on any of the social media icons at the bottom of their home page (http://grcity.us/Pages/default.aspx) brings up not only links to their official Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Youtube pages, but also links to other pages users may find useful (such as the Grand Rapids Fire Preventions Youtube page, the MyGR City Points Twitter, and the Facebook pages for each department in the city). Since we will specifically use Twitter in our analysis of Lansing, we took a more in-depth look at the City of Grand Rapids Twitter page. Grand Rapids maintains a pretty lively Twitter. They tweet pretty regularly, though some days they post multiple tweets, and other times there may be only one for three or four days. The city provides a lot of useful information for their followers and varies the content of their tweets with text, photos, and links. They also do an excellent job of retweeting other Grand Rapids-based organizations to provide their followers with information or events that the city may not be officially part of and responding to users tweets when they ask the city directly. Grand Rapids is taking part in the conversations that are being had on social media sites like Twitter. This makes it easier for them to gauge what their residents are passionate about, as well as how they feel about particular issues. In turn, it is easier for residents to communicate with the city as well. Using Twitter as the City of Grand Rapids does, using informal, friendly language and tone, unmasks the cold, hard, official image that can be associated with government (even at the city level), and allows residents to feel comfortable

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starting or taking part in important conversations with the city. Ann Arbor: Powerful Social media strategies in Michigan are evident in the city of Ann Arbor as well. Ann Arbor has a social media strategy to reach residents through Facebook and Twitter. Tweets made by the official City of Ann Arbor Twitter account have consistent recommendations, notifications, and updates on city topics. These topics are relevant to the public, engaging, and often include explanations of the links included in their tweets. In addition to the content of the posts, they frequently use hashtags to categorize their tweets and broaden their audience. Through the use of hashtags, the City allows their tweets to be seen by other Twitter users beyond their followers. This helps the City seem current with communication trends while attracting new visitors, businesses, and profits to the area. In result of these strategies implemented through their Twitter accounts, residents and other Twitter users can be well informed of city news and relevant information from a reliable source. By proving that they are capable of using social media by properly and frequently using their Twitter account, the City of Ann Arbor may seem more knowledgeable and therefore more trustworthy to residents and visitors. Having an online presence, especially within social media, is essential to a city's reputation and perceived image by the public. The use of social media has benefited the City of Ann Arbor by engaging the community through this new kind of rapid communication. Over 4,000 followers of the City of Ann Arbor become aware of important issues just through the daily tweets and postings that the city provides. By using their platform on Twitter, Ann Arbor projects a positive image onto the community at large. This continues to benefit the city, comparable in size to the City of Lansing, because residents and visitors have a chance to communicate with Ann Arbor officials and engage in useful conversation that positively impacts the city's image.

Research Focus
This project will be focused on the City of Lansing itself, not the entire greater Lansing area. We will be observing social media presence and structure made through official channels and comparing these findings to the reactions of individuals using these social media sites. Specifically, we will be looking for how people have perceived the citys brand; whether through perpetuation or hijacking, and what those results could mean for Lansing. To do this, we will be sifting through Twitter for both official and unofficial uses and mentions of Lansings identity. We believe that this is the opportune time to conduct this study, as social media tools allow us to see genuine public opinion in real time.

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We hope that the findings from this study will help the City Council to better understand how Lansing is perceived by the public, which will help you to better capture and project Lansings core identity as a city.

Central Research Questions

Using residents on Twitter as a representation for the larger whole, how does the public perceive the image (or brand) that the City of Lansing is putting forth through Twitter? Are they in accordance or is something not lining up? If there are differences, is there a way to alter the message so it becomes more accurate?

Methods
To conduct our research, we constructed the following methods to answer our initial research questions: 1. Use the Social Media Search Engine, Topsy, to locate and analyze tweets and hashtags related to Lansing 2. Categorize Lansing related tweets into 3 main events from the observed time period of our research a. The new casino controversy b. The holiday event, Silver Bells c. The introduction of the new brewery to Lansing 3. Bookmark and tag each Lansing related tweet with summarizing words (Excited, Upset, etc.) 4. Create two Word Clouds with the results of our collected data in tweets.

By using Topsy to collect and categorize tweets, we were able to quickly and efficiently detect patterns in the public's opinion of a specific topic. During the time frame of October 1st to November 15th, we noticed most tweets relating to the current events in the City of Lansing. Specifically, the proposed building of the Lansing casino, the Capitol's holiday event "Silver Bells" and the reaction to the opening of a new brewery in the city. By tagging and organizing these tweets into word clouds, we were able to better understand how the majority of the population felt about each subject. In the small time frame that we had, our research methods helped us discover the frequency in which Lansing residents use Twitter to reach the community and how they are reacting to current city issues. Our method of collecting of tweets is comparable to going out into a crowd and listening in on unedited, real opinions about the issues residents care about.

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Issues
Our project scope was initially limited by time and resource constraints. In a longer project, we would examine the social media conversation on a larger scale and use more advanced data analysis methods. Because this was not an option, we opted to look at three specific topics and do our analysis by hand. Using Twitter as a research method is a relatively new approach and posed some problems. Collecting and analyzing tweets provides some quantitative data (e.g. word counts), but it has little meaning without context. Information of real value only comes from observation. By reading many tweets about a topic, we were able to gain a deep understanding of public sentiment. Twitter research is in a sense the act of listening in on the public conversation. While Twitter doesnt accurately gauge individual opinion in the way that a survey would, it reveals a social conversation that shapes individual opinion and the public identity of the city. As we began our research, Lansings lack of a strong social media presence became our biggest obstacle. @lansingmichigan, the citys official twitter account, exclusively posts links to news articles with brief captions. It does not engage other users and does not work to build or maintain the citys identity. In an effort to continue our work, we used @downtownlansing, Downtown Lansing, Inc.s twitter account, as a representation of the citys official identity. This organization promotes business and activities in Lansings downtown area and seems to have shared interests with the city government. However, the assumption that an independent organization is completely aligned with the goals of the city is problematic for many reasons. This decision represents a shift in the focus of our project. We continued to compare the personal and official identities of Lansing, but the gap left unfilled by @lansingmichigan became the primary subject of our attention. There is an ongoing public conversation on Twitter, and the city simply does not have a voice in it.

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@lansingmichigan vs. @downtownlansing

In order to better understand our choice to look at Downtown Lansing, Inc.s twitter account, compare the two Lansing accounts we have discussed.

This is a selection of tweets from the citys official page. As you can see, each tweet contains a link with a brief description. At times, the account even tweets links with no other text attached. It never connects with other accounts (i.e. Lansing businesses or residents) and never uses hashtags to promote events.

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This is a selection from Downtown Lansing, Inc.s twitter account. It frequently retweets posts from other local organizations to establish connections in the social media space. It also frequently uses hashtags like #lovelansing and encourages others to do the same. This promotes participation in their online conversation, as well as makes their posts more visible on the site.

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Findings
After recording all of the tweets in our timeframe, we created two word clouds to visualize our data.

The first illustrates the tags we created for each tweet. This provides a look at the specific topics and sentiments that were trending from October to mid-November. The number of personal tweets far surpasses the number of official tweets, but this was to be expected. Silver Bells was the most talked about topic, mainly because it took place during our sample time.

The second word cloud is made up from the actual text of the tweets we recorded. This is may give a better sense of the conversation that was happening online. Again, it is clear that Silver Bells dominated, but the planned casino was also a large subject of discussion.

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Tweets about Silver Bells consistently expressed excitement. This tweet connected to two other accounts: @silverbellslans and @downtownlansing. It also used the hashtag #lovelansing instead of the word Lansing, something that is commonly done. The Silver Bells twitter account responded and encouraged further social media participation. This is a great example of an organization taking part in the Twitter conversation. The negative public sentiment towards the casino is very apparent on Twitter. We did not record a single positive tweet on the topic. This does not mean every individual is against it, but theyre voices are not present in the large public conversation. While @downtownlansing frequently communicated with individuals regarding Silver Bells, they had nothing to say about the casino. The controversy belongs to the city, but the offical Lansing account took no action to participate online. Even if the city cannot sway opinions about the project, a strong social media connection could reduce the amount of negative stigma it inherets from the controversy.

The arrival of HopCat was met with nothing but excitement by Lansing residents. However, one tweet pointed out the lack of parking available in the area. This was a perfect opportunity for the city to engage the public and react to their

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honest views. Even if the parking problem could not be solved, the city could have saved face and won over the one resident who voiced their complaint. At the outset of our project, we aimed to examine the interplay between Lansings public and official identities. Though our focus shifted greatly, we still approached an answer to this question. The two identities do not line up, because no link has been built between them. A strong, official representation of the identity Lansing hopes to embody is simply not represented online.

Implications
There is a robust discussion happening on Twitter. It provides the Lansing government an opportunity to listen in as the public praises, questions, and complains about the city. More importantly, it allows the city to participate, to engage its residents and gain greater control over their perception. Currently, the Lansing government often appears distant and inaccessable to its residents. If people are dissatisfied (as so many are in the case of the casino), they use social media to discuss it. When only negative opinions exist in the conversation, they tend to increase. Those who are undecided will be convinced by the dissenters. Those who are already against the topic will feel more justified in their stance. With a presence on sites like Twitter, the city could provide balance to the discussion. It could present counterarguments and attempt to win people over. This may not alter peoples opinions about the topic in question, but it would represent Lansing in a positive light. People like it when their voices are heard, even if they dont get the answer they want.

Recommendation
Our research has made it clear that Twitter stands to be a very valuable resource for the city of Lansing. It is an effective gauge of public opinion, as well as a venue for improvement of the citys image. Moving forward, we strongly advise that you work to better take advantage of this opportunity. A great improvement could be made by simply hiring an intern to do social media work. Lansing Community College and Michigan State Univerity are both full of web-savvy students who would gladly run the citys social media accounts. Throughout this project, we have had the best interests of the city in mind. We believe that an increased online presence would have a great deal of benefit for both the city and its residents.