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What You’ll Learn
EWEB is one year into trying out Nextdoor as a communication tool, and they are seeing good results due to the platform’s focus on geographic filters.
Guest Speaker
Adam SpencerShow Notes
Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.
Andy Johns: How can utilities use a social media platform Nextdoor? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer. And I’m joined on this episode by Adam Spencer, who is the communications specialist at Eugene Water and Electric Board EWEB. Adam, thank you for joining me.
Adam Spencer: Yeah, thanks for having me, Andy.
Andy Johns: So I ran across an article in, full disclosure, I think it was the NWPPA Bulletin. Just a really cool approach that you guys have. And one of the first groups that I’ve seen, one of the first utilities or broadband providers that I’ve seen using Nextdoor as a communications tool, both for listening and for getting a message out. So, Adam, let’s start right off. For the folks that aren’t as familiar with Nextdoor, kind of give us your your high level overview. What is it?
Adam Spencer: Yeah. Well, Nextdoor is a social media platform. It looks a lot like Facebook, and it’s all local based. So you, the users, who are called neighbors, enter in their addresses, and Nextdoor verifies their address. And it attempts to pair them into the conversations in their neighborhoods. So it’s really a good social media platform for local businesses, for advertising to places, you know, restaurants, as well as connecting with your actual neighbors, real people. You know, social media is going through waves of popularity and unpopularity. And so we were reticent at first to join Nextdoor and add another social media platform. And a few of our team members had had poor experiences on Nextdoor. And when one of our commissioners asked us to look into it, after hearing about some conversations about EWEB that we were missing and, you know, wanting to address those customer concerns, we were hesitant. But looking into it more and then once we joined, we really found that that local piece to it is a real benefit for us as serving a local geography-based customer base. And so, you know, you have different neighborhoods. The people who are on the platform can range how broad they want to see those conversations, how finite their neighborhoods are. And so it’s a great place to have utilities be able to target our customers directly.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And I want to get into the specifics of what you guys are doing there in just a moment. But before we do, you know, you are faced, I’m sure, like a lot of the folks that we work with at Pioneer, like our own Pioneer Social team, it seems like there are new social media platforms coming out and, like you said, rising and falling and popularity. You know, there’s been some that have more of a political slant than others. There are different nuances for each one. How do you guys look at it? Because it’s impossible to be everywhere. We know, you know, at least from the data we have, Facebook is still appears to be, in most places, the 800 pound gorilla in the room. But how do you guys decide when to chase a platform like you have with Nextdoor and when you know, to something else that comes out that you may, you know, watch and see what happens? How do you guys kind of make that decision on where to be?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, we’ve had conversations about joining TikTok. And then with the potential ban and with us dealing with safety issues and those concerns there, we’ve stayed away. You know, when Twitter turned to X, there’s a bunch of different platforms that arose: Bluesky, Mastodon. But we have a six person team, and we want to make sure we’re focusing our efforts where our customers are. And so Nextdoor we found this pathway to join. It’s called Nextdoor for public agencies. And that really made it an easy answer because Nextdoor takes all of those location verified customers within our service territory, and it automatically made them our followers once we join the platform and could verify our service territory included those customers. So we went from zero followers on Nextdoor to joining getting through that process, and we ended up with about 68,000 followers just by Nextdoor, verifying our role as a public utility and having our customers within that service territory. So we got a direct connection. We didn’t have to build the following. We didn’t have to see who’s out there and game out the waters. We just were able to join and say, “Hey, you’re our customers, and now we’re here too.”
Andy Johns: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s got to be appealing to folks because growing up to 68,000 on a new platform would have taken a long time, and probably a lot of money.
Adam Spencer: So yeah, we’re on Facebook and, you know, we have 10,000-11,000 followers after being on Facebook for 15 years. And most, you know, 60% of those are so say on their place of location is Eugene. But we don’t know if people have moved and still follow us or who they are, really. So really, just having that Nextdoor sends physical mail to an address to verify. Yes, we are in EWEB’s service territory that we know we are talking to our customers and when they talk back to us, it shows their neighborhood. So we know how we are affecting their life, their quality of life with construction projects or outages. And we get a sense of where they’re coming from. And it’s just really helpful to see like, yes, hey, real person to real person through these social media platforms in an age where we’re not sure who we’re talking to or if we’re even talking to somebody.
Andy Johns: Yeah. This seems like a fantastic opportunity. Where have you, how have you seen where the conversations are different or the tone is different? You know, that’s one of the things we’ve looked at with social media is it’s better that you’re tweaking every message. I think a lot of the time there’s a temptation to just do the exact same thing on LinkedIn that you do on Facebook, that you do on Instagram. But we know that there are nuances to each one. What have you seen in terms of the Nextdoor audience and the conversations they’re having? How are they different, if they are, than some of the other platforms?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, I would say there’s more civility involved, you know, again, with people.
Andy Johns: Sounds promising.
Adam Spencer: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, that’s like I said, we were a little hesitant at first because of a few bad experiences or, you know, you see some negative stuff and then, you know, it’s displeasing. But there’s that community sense of somebody types in a comment, and they’re representing West Deerhorn. You know, their neighbors see what they say as well. And there’s some actual accountability involved. As we post representing Eugene Water and Electric Board, it says my name and title as well. So I can develop my own relationship. And people see my own voice or the projects that I’m representing, and it allows for a little bit more of a rapport to develop between, you know, this big black box of the public utility and our customers when it’s Adam Spencer is commenting this about this project and following up with, you know, some more try to be personable relationship and, you know, so I think that helps. Nextdoor also really discourages political discourse. And so we don’t really have to manage or flag things that, you know, we’re talking on a local, very localized level, you know, sometimes street corners and construction impacts. And if someone takes that conversation to this national politicized conversation of, oh, that’s because of X, you know, or this idea or policy or, you know, Nextdoor manages that itself as well as the neighborhood managers that it has just to keep things civil and localized.
Adam Spencer: And, you know, we owe our customers a lot of explaining about why our rates are rising and what they’re paying for and our strategies to provide them energy for the next 20 years. And it’s a lot to talk about. And so we just try to keep it to that and Nextdoor helps with that. So we’ve actually had a few events comparing Nextdoor to Facebook and the types of conversations we’ve had. We had a big ice storm in January and a lot of positivity on both platforms. But I found with Nextdoor it was it was easier to see, you know, where people are coming from and be a little more empathetic to like, okay. Yeah. You’ve been without power for ten days, and that’s why you’re saying something with some frustration behind it. And, you know, we’re working on it. And here’s some photos of our crews working in your neighborhood, and we’ll get on it. And it just overall seemed a little more easier to cope with the negativity that we receive. And I think just a little less negativity in general.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And I guess that dovetails nicely into the next thing I was going to ask, which is how are your messages different or the same? Are you guys putting out most of the same information on Nextdoor that you’ve got in other platforms, or are you able to to capitalize on that hyper local capabilities that it has? Are most of the same between them or do you do differently?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, one of the really special things about Nextdoor is along with sending in our service territory map, we were able to send custom maps. So we have maybe 30-40 different maps that we can say send this post to our billing cycle 17 if there was a late issue with that billing cycle. Or send this post to people who are served by the Hilliard substation, because there’s something special going on there. So we can really localize and contain our messaging that’s affecting people. And so people aren’t confused of, oh, is this outage affecting me? Should I not come home, or should I go somewhere else to work today? Because they’re not seeing a message that might not affect them. So by this public agencies pathway, we’ve had our GIS team share with Nextdoor all of our different service territory maps by substation, by high risk fire zone so we can localize those public safety power shut off messaging to hey, this is only affecting people in the high risk fire zones. So if you see this message on Facebook as like, hey, we have a PSPS, settings are in play and people say, oh, is that going to affect me? They’re not going to see that on Facebook because it won’t affect them. So that’s really helpful to send that kind of targeted messaging. And you know, we have a lot of grants that might affect or be eligible for people in some areas or other areas, or just how much people want to hear about some of the projects upriver versus in our main urban service territory. So yeah, it’s been really helpful to geographically target and just systematically target who we’re talking to. Otherwise, you know, a lot of our events and positive spin kind of stuff and things that everybody should know, we do just share along all the platforms. So there’s definitely a little bit of play. But then also, you know, having it come from me specifically versus EWEB posting on Facebook or Instagram, I can add a little bit more of a personal touch. So yeah, there’s certainly some play in our voice and what we’re saying to whom.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And then you’ve got the ability on the back end like you said. I mean, every layer that you add in there, you can you can send out directly to the folks on that layer, you know, based on the GIS map.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Andy Johns: That’s a powerful tool.
Adam Spencer: When you make a post, you can say, “entire following” or you can choose which neighborhoods or which custom areas. And so that’s been helpful, really helpful for construction projects to say, hey, here’s the area. Or, you know, we’re not flooding the entire service territory with things that aren’t necessarily relevant. And that makes people check out when you post too much that’s not relevant.
Andy Johns: Yeah, I can imagine there are some broadband providers listening, you know, some either utilities that have done it or some telcos that are thinking, hey, that’s a perfect way to target where we’re getting fiber, you know, where the construction projects are. So I was going to get into some of the listening that you guys do. But while we’re talking about the layers, it seems like one of the – and I may not be saying that right, the GIS files – seems like one of the hurdles potentially to somebody starting Nextdoor is that start up process. You know, on most social media platforms, you can be live within, you know, a pretty quick amount of time just creating the account and going, it sounds like there’s a lot more to it on the setup side for Nextdoor. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what was involved in that with the verification, the layers? Are there fees, that sort of thing? Tell us about getting started.
Adam Spencer: Yeah, I don’t recall any fees. There was some staff time in, you know, sending some tax documents, sending in our GIS files. But, you know, other than that, that’s kind of the benefit of joining that everybody has to go through to be verified as a neighbor to send something to Nextdoor, and then they mail it to you. So, it’s kind of, I guess, it takes a little time, but that’s the price to play in a platform that is based on locality. And that assures that you’re dealing with real people and you know, that we are the public agency serving this amount of territory. So and then because we went through that process, we were handed, here’s the 68,000 customers that are on Nextdoor in your service territory. And, you know, here’s your opportunity to talk to them with posts and events and polls and then also emergency alerts. They can receive a push notification. So, you know, we’re also a water utility. So if there’s ever an issue with a boil water notice, we can send an emergency alert. And that’s one of the harder things is like how do we reach people to say, don’t drink the water as soon as we need to hear them, or as soon as we need them to hear that message? So it takes a little bit of time on up front, but it’s certainly worth it.
Andy Johns: Yeah. Forgive my ignorance on on the platform. But so, one of the downsides that we’ve seen from folks, whether they’re, you know, a lot of folks are using primarily X right now, formerly Twitter, to post outages. You know, outage alerts, that sort of thing. But the downside is if anybody ever goes to your page, your actual, you know, not their feed, but your actual page. They just see this long list of times when there’s been service outages. You’re like, wow, do these people ever actually provide power, or are they just out of power all the time? Is there a, do you have a page or where people can see that? Or is it based on everything is tied back to their geography, where they’re never going to see something that was posted in a different geography? Is that correct?
Adam Spencer: Yeah. Correct. Yeah, so when somebody from, you know, the upriver area, which is where we have a lot more forested areas, they have more outages. They’ll only see on our home page our posts that are targeted to their neighborhoods or to the entire service territory.
Andy Johns: Wow. Very cool. Let me talk about listening, because the cool thing about social media, if it’s done right, it’s a two way street. You know, you’re not just pushing stuff out there all the time. How formal do you guys get? What are the any tools available? Just in terms of listening and seeing what folks are talking about, whether it’s about you specifically or whether it’s about other things that you need to be aware of in the community. What kind of a tool has Nextdoor been for you and the team as a listening tool?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, so that was where we got into it originally, is we were hearing these conversations from neighbors who would call commissioners and say, hey, you got to hear what people are saying. Is this true? Or, you know, can you address these concerns? And so that’s what our commissioners were asking us to get involved. And it turns out that that’s not a tool we can use on Nextdoor. And it makes sense if you think about it. And so Nextdoor is giving you a backstage pass to those 60,000 or however many customers are on Nextdoor in your service territory as a public agency. And then if you think about the big brother aspect of like, hey, we’re giving this public agency, there’s a lot of, you know, police departments, fire departments, medical services, but, you know, particularly something like a police department, if then suddenly, like, they’re allowed to see all those conversations that might make people less likely to support that on the platform. So we weren’t able to see just, you know, those conversations between neighbors or when people even mention our name. Only on our posts can we receive comments. So, you know, we do. There are things we do, and people respond to that.
Adam Spencer: And they take to social media to, you know, I’m going to say commend, but primarily complain. tThere’s not a lot of people just saying, I’m going to say, this is great. Right now, unprompted.
Andy Johns: Wouldn’t that be nice?
Adam Spencer: They can put that on our posts. But, you know, we like to think, yeah, people think about us in bad times generally. The lights aren’t working. Oh, I’m going to see what’s going on. You know, there’s construction blocking my commute. Why is that? You know, otherwise, our 99% that we are working, 99% of the time, people don’t think about us, and they don’t have to. So I think that’s kind of makes sense in all of that is like when we do assert ourselves into their feed and say, hey, this is what’s going on. We like you to know, what do you think? That’s when we hear from them and we get some good, good commentary and good conversations. But otherwise we can’t spy on them or get a sense of what they’re saying about us, you know, as their right as citizens to have that privacy.
Andy Johns: Right. Got it. Getting into the nitty gritty parts of it. I’m guessing, there’s some analytics behind it. Are there things, you know, is it vertical video like reels? Is it horizontal? Pictures? Just text? What kind of what kind of media are you throwing out there? And then what kind of information are you able to get back?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, we have been on the platform for a year, and we’re still exploring and comparing, and we’ve had a couple of those major events to directly compare Nextdoor and Facebook. First of all, just because we’ve had so many customers jumping on, we’ve got a lot higher impressions. You know, we get a lot better responses to our posts because there’s just that volume. We can post, you know, I downloaded a reel from Instagram and posted it to Nextdoor, and it posts as like a 16×9 in the preview. But when you click on it, it comes up as a full vertical video, so you don’t have to reformat everything for both. So it does look a little funny in the scroll preview, but then if you click on it, then it comes up. Yeah, we post photos. You can post multiple photos. You can post polls as just another way to spur engagement, and people can see what their neighbors are thinking and, you know, voting on caption contests and just some fun kind of stuff like that. And then there’s the emergency alerts that end up as push notifications. So, really, it’s pretty similar, you know, posts are pretty similar videos, photos. And then, you know, Twitter has Twitter polls. And then that emergency aspect is just an added bonus. And we, I think, just really only very rarely do we use that. Just to not abuse it. So most of it is just hey, if you’re on Nextdoor, come and you want to learn about what we’re doing, here’s some of that information. Here’s some photos of us participating with a neighborhood event, etc.
Andy Johns: Yeah. Wrapping it up here shortly. I was looking at some of the other platforms for you guys are on it looks like you’re pretty active on YouTube and on Facebook. Maybe not X or Twitter as much anymore, but kind of rank the places where y’all are, and where does Nextdoor fall into that? I mean, would you consider it a a primary digital communications tool? Is it still behind Facebook for you? Where, if you can, kind of rank them for me, just in terms of priority and usefulness?
Adam Spencer: Yeah, that’s a great conversation. You know, I would still say Facebook is our main contributor. I think that’s also just our mentality. And then the Facebook business suite, you can post straight to Facebook and Instagram. You know, personally, I like Instagram more. That’s just what I use. But there’s certainly more following and volume on Facebook. We use YouTube for some of our bigger program announcements as well as our board meetings we post there. And did a good study between YouTube and Facebook advertising with a video last year. I produce videos for EWEB. And that, I found [inaudible] for about $300 on YouTube and $300 on Facebook. We had about 9,000 views on YouTube, and I think it was only around 5,000 on Facebook. So, and, you know, more time viewed on YouTube. So we’re starting to use YouTube a little bit more for advertising. And just those concepts of what we’re doing and why videos are a good way to do that rather than a series of posts. X you know, once it became X and taken over, it’s really been down throttled, unless you are a subscriber, and we just didn’t subscribe and use that to talk to journalists to get them aware of things and outage notifications. And then we’re really taking on to LinkedIn with some new gusto using that to promote our thought leadership in the field. We’re Oregon’s largest public utility and a lot of times journalists come talk to us. And just as a way to find new recruits and make sure people are aware of us trying out new things and being a good place to work. So we’re trying to be in some of those industry conversations there. And then Nextdoor is we’re just trying to bring it in and remember to add that and test out all of its features. And just really put it into our workflow. So I could really see it becoming our biggest and foremost platform. Just because of that followership base and kind of the ability to talk to real people in our neighborhoods. So, you know, again, it’s surprising to me because I don’t think of it. It’s not on the big scene, as, you know, one of the big five tech companies or anything like that. And I don’t really use it personally that much. And so it’s a little surprising to see how many people are on it. So I think that’s something we can look into more is how often people use it and what they’re using it for. But just that sheer volume that we’ve inherited by going through the paperwork, it really seems like that’s a good place for us to be.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And it’s definitely something, you know, you mentioned personal use, is definitely something I’m going to download and try to get started and just kind of explore the platform a little more. Obviously, from this conversation, I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to to Nextdoor, but I’d like to give it a try. Last question I have for you. What advice would you have for somebody who’s thinking about it, who’s listening to this, or who’s been kind of aware of Nextdoor a little bit like, you know, I’m thinking I may I may give it a try. What advice do you have for somebody who’s where you were a year ago?
Adam Spencer: Yeah. You know, we like I said, we were hesitant and thought it was another thing to manage. And it is. You know, it’s one of those things. We are programed and the social media companies know this. We want to post something and see how many likes we get, and we get that endorphin hit. And when you take over for a company in a public utility, and it’s your job and profession, and you’ve got a great photo or a great story to share, you know, you get that same like, oh, I want to see people engage with it. And so it is another place to do that. And I’ve just been positively encouraged by the amount of following we’ve gotten, the amount of engagement we’ve gotten, the general positivity. And just as another opportunity to be authentic with your customers. You know, I pride myself in really caring about what I do and taking that as another opportunity to say yes. I am proud to work for this organization, and I understand what we’re doing. And I know if you’re a customer and you’re upset with some of the things we’re doing, how can we make it work or explain it to you if you can at least be a little more understanding? So it’s just another opportunity to be proud of what we do, serving our customers and meeting all these challenging upcoming things we have in the utility industry, providing energy, keeping costs down, working on climate protecting energy. So, yeah, it’s just we’re in a really exciting time in the utility industry, and there’s a lot of changes going on. And this is just another way to try to communicate with folks of what we’re doing and why.
Andy Johns: Yeah, sounds like it. I’m sold. I’m gonna give it a try. Sounds like a powerful tool. You know, full disclosure for listeners, this is not something that Pioneer Social is doing right now. We are looking at it to see if we can offer Nextdoor support for folks. But, right now, this is just a really cool idea that Adam and the team over at Eugene Water and Electric Board are doing, and thought it was a great way to highlight it. So Adam, thanks for joining me.
Adam Spencer: Yeah. And I should say I’m not employed by Nextdoor or getting anything from them. You know, just it’s something we looked into and had a good experience.
Andy Johns: Wonderful. Well, thanks for sharing that with us. He is Adam Spencer, the communications specialist at Eugene Water and Electric Board. I’m your host, Andy Johns with Pioneer. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.