City Of Shawnee Keeps Citizens Informed with Twitter

NEWS 9 for the NewsOn6.com

SHAWNEE, OK -- Twitter is growing daily in popularity and quickly becoming the hottest new social networking site. In the beginning, it was a way to keep up with your friends, but now, one local community is using it to keep their citizens informed 24-7.

As a public information officer, Stephen Nolen's job is to keep the citizens of Shawnee informed.
And these days, he's discovered a new tool to help him be successful.

"Obviously the web is the easy way of keeping people aware of what's going on in their community and Twitter is just one of the ways of doing that," Officer Nolen said.

After discovering larger cities were using Twitter, Nolen signed up the city of Shawnee. The city has several user names: ShawneePD, ShawneeFD, and CityofShawneeOK. Now, anyone can receive tweets 24/7.

"If they want to see that kind of activity or calls on their Twitter Web page or phone, they can see that type of information," Officer Nolen said.

The calls range in from traffic accidents and burglaries to fires. Medical and domestic calls are not tweeted, but everything else, including city council agendas, are on Twitter.

"A lot individuals have commented they really like it. They thought it was a nice way of using the Twitter technology for information sharing," Officer Nolen said.

The cities of Edmond and Oklahoma City also have Twitter accounts.