Staying Informed and Involved Online

Below are some of the many ways we encourage people to stay informed and engaged, including Twitter,YouTube, Blogs, Flickr, RSS Feeds and Public Access Television.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking site that allows users to send and read other users' updates of up to 140 characters in length.  While people use Twitter in many different ways for both personal and professional reasons, we are using Twitter at the Governor's Office as another way to keep citizens informed about what we're doing and as another way to get feedback. 

You can follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/massgovernor. 

Please note:

• We follow people back who follow us.  If you’d rather we not, send us a direct message and we’ll be happy to comply.

• The account is maintained and monitored by a combination of Governor Patrick (usually appends his tweets with "-D"), and members of his communications and constituent services teams.

• While we try to respond to questions on Twitter as much as possible, if you have a question, concern or comment, you may still want to contact the Governor's Office by another method (especially if what you have to say requires more than 140 characters!).

• While the Governor does tweet directly and he and his staff watch and update Twitter as much as possible, please recognize that we also monitor and maintain many other channels of feedback, outreach and engagement, both in-person and online.

• To ensure that everyone's opinions and ideas are heard, feedback on Twitter is incorporated with feedback from public meetings, email, letters, phone calls, and in-person visits.

• Unless you protect your updates, messages you post on Twitter are public.  Because not everyone knows that we are on Twitter, we occasionally search for ‘tweets’ that talk about Governor Patrick but don’t reference our account, "@MassGovernor", and let that user know about our account. We’re not trying to stalk anyone. We just want to let as many people as possible know that we’re listening and engaging.

YouTube

To both increase transparency and save money on video hosting and streaming, we publish all of our video content to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/massgovernor and embed the videos back on our site. If you would like the video in another format, please contact us and we’ll be happy to provide it for you.

While we encourage you to subscribe to our videos, share them, comment on them, and embed them in your own sites, we often include additional context and information on our website that you might find helpful.  Visit our Media Center for more.

While we encourage you to subscribe to our videos, share them, comment on them, and embed them in your own sites, we often include additional context and information on our website that you might find helpful. Take some time, search around, and let us know if you can't find what you're looking for.

Send Us Your Own Video

The Governor encourages citizens to submit questions for him and his administration via video. He will periodically respond to some (such as this response to a Barnstable High School student’s question) and members of his administration and staff will respond to others.

To ask a question, please record your video, post it on YouTube and send us the link via Twitter or through our contact us page. The Governor or a member of his staff will record a response and we will post it online for everyone to view. Please include your name and hometown when submitting a video. We will take your video and include it in our response.

Please watch this video to learn more or check out other video exchanges with constituents.

Blogs

We're working with Secretariats and Agencies to launch a series of "Commonwealth Conversations" blogs to better connect people with their government.  Please visit them often, feel free to comment, and watch for more coming soon.  The blogs can be accessed through www.mass.gov/blogs

Flickr

We post all of our photos to Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/massgovernor.

If you'd like to use any of our photos for a story, blog post, printing, etc., we ask that you credit, "Photo Courtesy of Gov. Deval Patrick's Office."

RSS Feeds

While you can always check our site for regular updates, it's often easier to have information come to you.  RSS lets you do just that.  When you subscribe to an RSS feed, updates come to you as we post them.

We offer RSS feeds of both our News and Updates (which include the Governor's Daily Update) and our Press Releases. 

If you're unfamiliar with RSS Feeds and how to use them, please visit What is RSS? 

MyMassTV

The Governor's Office also supports providing video content to people via local cable access centers.  Visit their website, www.mymasstv.org, and read our press release about the launch of the network to learn more.