It's important, when you move to a new city, to immediately begin to integrate yourself into the community. Even if your babies need their diapers changed every ten minutes and you can barely spare a second to leave the house, you can still keep up to date with the goings on in your new community with the help of the internet or the local newspaper. If your new city is Mobile, Alabama, the city government has attempted to make things easier for you by creating a program called Mobile Connected.
Mobile Connected is the city's concession to its residents' increasing obsession with social networking. In these modern times, cities and old forms of media like newspapers and bulletin boards have two choices: they can either go the way of the dinosaur or they can jump on the bandwagon and create internet presences for themselves. Not even a car sweepstakes can lure people back to the old paper and face to face based methods of doing things any longer.
If you're not familiar with social networking, it's a form of communication in which people follow one another's lives and allow other people to follow theirs by creating a series of interconnected web pages that are constantly updated with news. This news can be anything from the results of a daughter's girls hockey tournament to the fact that they have just made a piece of toast. Of course, when government gets involved the information relayed through social networking sites becomes less frivolous, as the messages they attempt to disseminate are ones that affect their citizens lives.
Some of the things the city of Mobile might post online include the dates and information for community events like benefits for the special Olympics or pancakes breakfasts, news of new jobs opening up with the city, any high net worth investments being discussed in the city council meetings, and pictures, reports, and videos on events that have already occurred. By reading these after the fact reports especially you can give yourself something to talk about with neighbors who might have been there.
The city makes use of all the popular networking sites, so you can choose to follow whichever you prefer or even all of them. You can sign up for email newsletters at work so you can find out about any events where your company can do some food and beverage marketing. You can read their blog at Blogspot or their postings on Twitter and add their RSS feed so you'll be notified on your phone or email when there's news. You can also become a fan of the city on Facebook, see photos of city events on Flickr, or watch city videos on You Tube.
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