BY SANDRA GUY Business Reporter/sguy@suntimes.com March 26, 2012 1:54PM
Updated: March 26, 2012 10:46PM
Chicago ranked 17th, tied with Minneapolis and San Diego, among 75 major cities in its social-media savvy, with the city government getting kudos for its open data portals, use of Foursquare to encourage tourism and its mayoral and city clerk accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, according to a survey released Monday.
Topping the 2011 rankings were New York and Seattle, tied for first place, followed by Virginia Beach, Va., Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Kansas City, Mo.
The study, conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago, ranked cities based on their online interactivity, transparency and accessibility, including citizens' comments allowed on blogs and social networks and online information about budgets, neighborhood issues and city council meetings. One example was Seattle's use of the platform IdeaScale to let users submit and rate ideas for improving local government.
The report reflected Chicago's status before Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor. It cited Chicago's leveraging of social-media site nixle to enable city police to send alerts to people's email and phones, and the Chicago Public library's outreach via tumblr.
Among Illinois' 20 largest cities, Chicago ranked No. 2 behind Naperville because Naperville had more information online about how to contact officials, the workings of government processes and policies and the amount of information that people could access, said study co-author Karen Mossberger, head of UIC's public administration graduate program. Mossberger's co-author was Yonghong Wu, associate professor in the program.
Kevin Hauswirth, the city of Chicago's social media director, said since the report was done, Emanuel has hosted two #AskChicago Facebook town hall meetings, launched ChicagoBudget.org asking people how to improve the city's financial situation and started ChicagoShovel.org to let city resdients offer winter-preparedness ideas, track snowplows in real time and use winter web apps that Chicago developers built.
The report concluded that local governments are becoming more open to social media, but some still post files that require special software to download or issue budget information that's difficult to understand.
Among the 75 cities studied nationwide, 87 percent used Twitter compared with 25 percent two years earlier; 87 percent used Facebook versus 13 percent in 2009, and 75 percent posted links on YouTube, up from 16 percent in 2009.
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