New York City powers ahead on social and digital

By Steve Keenan

This is the first feature in a five-part focus on how NYC uses social media in travel. To read the rest of the report, written for WTM London, click here

HEADING to New York City this year? Don’t worry about staying in touch – you’re heading to one of the world’s most connected cities.

There is now 98% connectivity in the city’s residential areas, and every public library has free wifi. So do many of the parks. Quite aside from the coffee shops, hotels and restaurants.

Forgot your charger? Again, help is at hand – free, solar-powered phone charging stations have been installed at 25 locations throughout the city this summer.

New York’s stated aim is to be the world’s leading digital city - and what it is doing for its residents is having direct, beneficial spin-off for visitors and tourists alike, with social media at the heart of distributing information.

Helping spearhead the charge is Rachel Haot (pictured above with Mayor Bloomberg), appointed in January, 2011, to be NYC’s chief digital officer. Born in Manhattan, and raised and educated in New York, Haot went on to found GroundReport, a crowdsourced news service, before joining the Mayor’s Office, aged 28.

Her first 90 days were spent putting together a background report on the city’s digital roadmap. Then shortly afterwards, she was to marry her newly-found knowledge of local government with her social media skills when Hurricane Irene hit town.

As Vogue reported in October, 2011, Haot was “at the centre of a real-time experiment in how a municipal government networks with its citizens during a natural disaster. It involved coordinating the city’s use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Crowdmap, and its own Web site and data mine to send out alerts (“Stay indoors”), provide maps with citizen-submitted photos and reports (downed trees, power outages), and answer questions spreading through the digital sphere.”

Now there are 300 social media channels in New York City, for New Yorkers to send a photo about a manhole cover missing, sign up for email updates or send a question to Mayor Bloomberg on the city’s Tumblr account.

“We want to make sure everyone gets online,” she says. That includes lower-income households, hence initiatives such as extending free wifi, while another project - Made in New York - is giving grants to help start ups open and get online in the city. “Infrastructure is No 1,” she adds. “The city is working hard to increase the amount of fibre connectivity.”

Storify, TechCrunch and Livestream are among resident social/digital companies, with Storify recently announcing it is to hire 130 more engineers to add to its 200+ staff. A quick Linkedin search I made one one day in June also showed 470 jobs available for social media managers in the city - New York is giving Silicon Valley and Boston a run for the title of America’s digital capital.

There has been a hackathon to formulate ideas to rebuild the city’s website, while the first of a series of meetings with residents was held this month to discuss the next phase of the digital roadmap. And New York has also succeeded in getting its own domain suffix. Haot posted on her Twitter account (@rachelhaot): “Follow ‪@dotnyc to stay informed on next steps for .NYC, rolling out in late 2013/early 2014 - ‪http://mydotnyc.com.”

It was followed up by: “Want to build an app using ‪@nycgov open data? Over 2,000 data sets, from WiFi hotspots to water fountain locations: ‪http://nyc.gov/data.”

And the ever-active Haot tweeted a photo of people using the new solar-powered charging stations - an idea that is hoped to become permanent after the three-month experiment this summer. And certainly an idea other cities can be expected to adopt, for residents and tourists.

Coding and digital engineering are helping transform the city to enable it to tackle challenges. But it will always need social media to get the message across, a lesson for travel and other industry leaders to understand.

TAKEAWAYS

* The importance of connectivity in your hotel, restaurant or resort. Being permanently plugged into social is now an imperative.
* The value of engaging with your community (be it readers, clients or neighbours) to buy into your plans, and help evolve them.