Saturday, November 28, 2015

Snapchat & the Public Sector

In the class we didn’t present the social media tool Snapchat, so I thought it would be good to do a blog post on the app since it is becoming very popular among politicians in the U.S. The app started as a way for teenagers to communicate with their friends “privately” because the pictures or 10-seconds videos automatically delete after you send them. This feature has made the app very controversial, especially when a hacker was able to enter Snapchat’s data and leaked many private pictures. The issue landed the app in court because many of the pictures where child pornography.

However, Snapchat had changed a lot since this happened. The app now has many “channels” that show content from different magazines and TV channels. It also features exclusive daily stories that every user can see and range from nation/city branding efforts to the presidential debates (below you can see a video of the story posted for one of the debates) and NFL games. I understand this is the feature that matters most to government agencies, as it allows them to show content to more than 100 million daily active users.


More importantly, it is a trendy app for presidential candidates in the U.S. The app allows for candidates to have a more personalized communication with millennials. For example, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie are using it to communicate directly with their followers. Snapchat is also being used by government agencies, such as the Utah Division of Emergency Management, which use it to share better ways to be prepared for emergencies.


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