17736_Authority_August

16 The Authority | August 2024 B ehind the S cenes : M anaging and P romoting O ur E xecutive D irector ’ s M essage from X ( formerly T witter ) to L ocal M edia By Lindsay Hughes, Manager of Admin and Public Relations, North Penn Water Authority In December 2023, Anthony Bellitto, Executive Director of North Penn Water Authority (NPWA), testified on behalf of PMAA in front of the House Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee in Harrisburg to share his views on the negative impacts of Act 12. A portion of his testimony was posted to X, formerly Twitter, and gained so much traction that it garnered more than 5.2 million views, 5,244 reposts, 23,600 likes, 1,395 bookmarks. We were all blown away. Tony went viral! Thankfully, it was a message worth sharing far and wide. The message was clear: Act 12 does not benefit the consumer, especially for the rate-paying customers of well-run municipal authorities. Such a large audience received and embraced this message, which is a major win for municipal authorities and municipal water and sewer systems. Since many of those viewing the video were not local to us, we knew we needed to leverage this the best we could locally, to further spread the message and to poise Tony as a leader in water and in the fight against privatization. We shared a screen shot of the viral post to Facebook and LinkedIn with a link to the post on X. We then wrote a press release to send to our local news outlets, our Borough and Township managers and our local Chambers of Commerce. In addition to the 5.2 million views on X, we placed an article in our local paper and information about the testimony was published in seven other news outlets, resulting in an additional 1.75 million people being exposed to the message. This was a fantastic, yet unexpected opportunity for NPWA. It is worth noting that the entire testimony included seven people and was about an hour and a half in length, but it was a two minute, 45 second clip that went viral. This served as a reminder that you can’t always predict what the media is going to pick up and publish or what the general public is going to be interested in. Preparation is key and a great media training session can help. S To learn more about this topic, attend the session, The Struggle is Real: How to Leverage Social Media and Creatively Engage Your Customers and Stakeholders on Tuesday morning at PMAA’s annual conference in September.