They're Already Talking About You

Right now, somewhere in your city, a resident is forming an opinion about your government. Probably not from your website. Probably not from your latest press release. More likely from a neighbor’s comment in a Facebook group, a thread on Nextdoor, or a thirty-second reel on Instagram. They are deciding whether you can be trusted, and they are doing it whether or not you are part of the conversation.
That is the reality most of us in government communications have not fully sat with. The conversation about your city is happening every single day, in rooms you were never invited to and places you can’t always be.

And it is happening at the hardest possible moment to earn trust. Only 15% of young Americans say they trust the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time, the lowest level ever recorded (Harvard Youth Poll, 52nd Edition, Spring 2026). Half now say “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does,” up 15 points since 2017, and it holds across party lines. Hope has collapsed too: just 26% of young Americans feel hopeful about America’s future, down from 55% in 2021.

Read that again. Half of a generation believes they have no voice.

Here is the part that should change how you see your own job. Local government is a different story entirely. Sixty-seven percent of Americans still trust their local leaders to handle community issues (Gallup), a 39-point trust advantage over the federal government. While trust in national institutions keeps falling, the city, the county, and the town hall down the street still holds something almost no one else in public life can claim right now. People are still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The only question is whether we are using it.

And right now there is a gap between that trust and the way we communicate. Only 36% of Americans believe their local government communicates effectively (Orlo, 2026). Meanwhile, 53% of US adults get their local news from social media, not from your website and not from your press release. Residents are forming their impression of you in the channels they already live in, and if you are not there, you are not neutral. You are absent, and someone else is telling your story for you.

Trust doesn’t erode overnight. It erodes one unanswered comment at a time. But this is also where opportunity awaits.

Most communicators ask the wrong question first. They ask, “What should we post?”

The right first questions are, “What are residents already saying? And what do they need to know?”

You cannot build a communication strategy on a foundation you do not understand. I learned that as Chief Digital Officer in Gilbert, Arizona. You listen first. Then you speak with purpose.

That breaks down into three habits.

1. Know where the conversation is actually happening

Residents do not wait for your channels. They gather in the ones that feel natural to them: Nextdoor, neighborhood Facebook groups, X, TikTok. That is where the conversation is already in progress, with or without you.

It gets harder inside your own walls. In most cities, social media is far more fragmented than leadership realizes. The parks department runs its own page. The police department runs another. Public works has a third. No shared strategy, no shared calendar, no single place to see the whole picture. You cannot understand resident sentiment if you can only ever see a sliver of it.

Your city has a brand whether you manage it or not. The only question is whether you are helping to shape it.

2. Listen systematically, not sporadically

Checking in or responding only when something blows up is not a strategy. Real listening means tracking sentiment over time, spotting a trend before it becomes a crisis, and learning what residents actually care about instead of what you assume they care about.

When I was in Gilbert, we surveyed residents about electric scooters. The loudest voices at council meetings, and people from other cities had convinced leadership that the town wouldn’t want them. So we asked the residents what they wanted. In a quick survey, only on social media, over one weekend. We got thousands of responses. And it turned out most residents liked the idea. They just did not know the rules or the possibilities. We prepared the data from the survey to present to leadership. The mayor and council were genuinely blindsided. So we put the police chief on a scooter and had him film a how-to video. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The data told a story the room never could have. And it changed the course of action to keep the scooters because that’s what the residents said they wanted.

The cities I worry about are the ones still building their entire strategy around the five angry people at the podium, while everyone else, the people too busy living their lives to make it to a Tuesday meeting, goes unheard.

Timing matters too. The middle of a crisis is not the moment to post, “Sorry for the confusion, here is an educational graphic.” By then you have already lost them. Those conversations have to happen before the emergency, and that is only possible if you have been listening all along.

3. Build two-way engagement

I describe the work as Digital-Now, People-First. The technology is the vehicle. The relationship is the destination. Surveys, polls, comment responses, a direct message that actually gets answered: those are not extras you get to when there is time. They are the infrastructure of trust and tell you what your residents want and how they feel.

I know why communicators hesitate. I have heard every version of it.

“We don’t have the budget.”

“What if we see something we can’t respond to?”

“Leadership won’t support it.”

“It feels like surveillance.”

But here is what I actually believe. Cities are not afraid to know what residents think. On some level, they already know. The hesitation is about being seen to know, and then being on the hook to respond.

But it’s amazing what happens when you’ve done the work ahead of time. When COVID hit, Gilbert was ready. Not because we had a pandemic plan, but because we already had half a million followers and a real relationship with our community that we had been building for years. Other cities were calling us to ask how we were doing it. Major American cities were saying, “We need to get our mayor on social media.” And I had to tell them the truth: you can’t just be starting now to build a following.. There is a pandemic. You have no followers and nowhere to reach people. When the emergency arrives, you already need the relationship to exist. Start today, before you’re needed tomorrow.

So let’s talk about cost, because that is the objection underneath all the others.
The question was never whether to invest in listening to your residents. The question is whether you have the right tools to do it. In most cities, you are not getting another full-time position. Not until someone retires, and maybe not even then. The right platform is the tool that fills that gap, at a fraction of the cost of a hire.

And the return is real. Social listening platforms deliver up to 183% ROI, with roughly a 6.5-month payback period. That is not a cost center. That is an investment. The private sector already knows it: the share of organizations using social listening software jumped from 44% to 78% in a single year. Local government is catching up. Cities need the right tools in their tool belt. It is 2026. Get on social media, and get the tools to do it well.

Here is where I get practical, because “get the right tools” is useless advice without specifics.

Not every platform is built for public agencies. Most social media tools were designed for brands selling products, and government has fundamentally different needs:

• Compliance and archiving for public records and FOIA
• Coordination across many departments and many channels
• Sentiment and trust tracking, not just likes and follows
• Real crisis communication capability
• Hyper-local engagement, including Nextdoor

When you evaluate a platform, look for:

• Social listening and sentiment analysis built in, not bolted on
• Archiving as a standard feature, not an upsell
• A unified inbox so nothing slips through the cracks
• Analytics that help you prove value to leadership
• AI-powered insights that surface what matters before it escalates
• A real way to measure public trust over time, not just engagement metrics

That last one is rare, and it is the one that matters most for our work.

This is why I point government clients toward Orlo. It was built for this. Not for influencers or retail brands, but for communicators trying to serve residents in a genuinely complicated environment. It is built specifically for the public sector, it includes social listening, sentiment analysis, and public-records archiving as standard, it integrates with Nextdoor, and its Trust Indicator actually measures the drivers of resident trust over time, not just clicks and follows. That is the difference between a marketing tool and a governing tool.

That difference is reflected in the experiences of the agencies using it every day. Mason Luvera, Communications and Engagement Manager for the City of Bothell, describes Orlo as “the only platform that fits our workflows as a local government perfectly. It’s the only platform that meets our needs without us having to change the way we operate.”

Angie Ramirez, Communications Manager for the City of Lakewood, echoed that sentiment. “Orlo really is built for government agencies. The bang for your buck compared to other social media management tools isn’t comparable. Their customer service is unmatched.”

So, back to the question I hear most often: “Where do I start?”

You start by deciding that the conversation residents are already having about your city deserves your presence in it. That is it. That is the whole first step. The conversation is happening with or without you. The only thing you control is whether you are in it. And once you are a part of the conversation you build relationships and trust and can improve city services.

So let me ask you the question I actually want you to sit with. What would it mean for your city if residents woke up tomorrow and genuinely felt like you were listening? What would change? What would get easier the next time something went wrong? That is not a hypothetical. It is a choice, and it is yours to make.

This is a conversation I want to keep having with the people actually doing this work. I am partnering with Orlo to go deeper: real tools, real stories from communicators in the field, and the honest truth about what it takes to rebuild trust from the inside out. Bring your questions. Bring your hardest challenges. That is exactly the kind of conversation that moves this work forward. Look for our podcast coming soon.