Kasim Reed recently has become quite the active tweeter.It just takes him a while to string together those 140-character messages.
“I value writing, and I like the process of putting my thoughts together,” Reed said. “So it was difficult for me at first, and I was very dismissive of the forum. One hundred and forty characters was offensive to me. I didn’t like it, so I rejected the medium.”
A Howard University-trained attorney and writer, the Atlanta mayor has now fully embraced many forms of social media, including Twitter and Facebook. He’s also led a social media revolution through City Hall, preaching the virtues of getting government more connected while building a network of followers he can have ready access to.
“What I like about Twitter is it is direct and authentic,” Reed said. “It has morphed into something that I enjoy, because I can express how I feel. If you read my tweets, it is me.”
Sonji Jacobs Dade, the city’s communications director, said when she came aboard in 2010, she found a city website and social media philosophy that was woefully behind the times.
“The whole world had moved and the city’s way of communicating was still in a 1990s framework,” Dade said. “One of my goals was moving the city in the direction of digital communication, and social media is a huge part of that.”
Between Twitter, Facebook and emails amassed during his 2009 campaign, Reed has “a universe of 100,000 individual identities” he can reach out to.
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