The Philadelphia social media sector benefits from being “down the road” from Silicon Alley in New York. The most exciting change coming to New York is the engineering campus due to open on Roosevelt Island with $100 million for infrastructure advances.
Digital media is hot in Philly, even without the Silicon Alley (Facebook is also centering its new engineering offices in Gotham). The University of Pennsylvania is ranked number two on a list published in March of the most social media savvy universities in the country by consulting company Sociagility. Harvard beat Penn, but apparently the brilliant engineers and computer whiz-kids at MIT didn’t have the digital social skills to place second: they’re in the third spot.
Our city government continues to push Philadelphia’s growth in the social and digital media sector. A new study from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Civic Engagement and Local E-Government: Social Networking Comes of Age, ranked the top cities in the US by local government’s social media savvy. They looked at factors such as:
- Ease of access to information about specific neighborhood topics
- Access to information on leaders on the city pay-roll
- Opportunity for citizens to participate in online forums and communities
- Online discussion that centered on city services and policy
Philly ranked number number nine, with New York and Seattle sharing the top spot. What we’d all like to see is study of which Mayor, Nutter or Bloomberg, spends more time extolling the virtues of their respective city’s digital and social media sector. Those of us working in the brotherly-love-tech-sector can never hear too much praise about our work. Thanks mayor.
Philly doesn’t have the ground-swell of billion dollar media and marketing companies found in NYC supporting its interactive media sector. The social-side of the digital revolution, however, is heard loud and clear from social media service consultants, to services offered by divisions of larger marketing agencies (the city is the nation’s fourth largest media market).