KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City is breaking new All-Star ground by using social media to help visitors navigate the city. People can tweet questions and volunteers in a media center will respond.
“Imagine this. So when you get to the airport and there’s always the concierge person with the sign with your name on it and they kind of take you on to your trip,” said Joe Cox, a chairman for the Social Media Club of Kansas City. “We wanted to be that person for Kansas City for everybody that came in.”
Using a combination of software, the more than 40 volunteers working in the trenches of the Mobile Command Center can pick up on my keywords and review my tweet.
“That’s the power of it to is not only are we getting people asking us questions. But we’re getting people sending us messages of whats going on in the city,” Cox said. “So, whether that be transportation, a road closing, different things going on in the city, we’ll get messages coming in to us and we can help distribute those messages out to everybody through social media.”
The center can also analyze the data coming in, giving them the ability to see how many people are talking about the city and it’s events, see where the hot spots in town are, and even see what people are talking about or asking.
“We believe that social media command centers and using this back channel of social media, we’re only seeing the beginnings of what this means for large events going on in the city,” Cox said.
The best part, the center is compiling images that people post online to create a social scrapbook of the town through the eyes of All-Star fans.
“We’re really proud that Kansas City is going to be somewhere that people are watching so when the next big large events come up, they will be modeling off of the system that we use,” said Cox.
If you have a question you can tweet it with the hashtag #KC or go to www.visitkc.com
