Before he became Athens County Sheriff, Pat Kelly had a personal "Pat Kelly" page on Facebook.
After his election, and as more people began using the site to keep track of news updates from his office, it morphed into a kind of quasi-official "Sheriff Pat Kelly" page.
And any day now, Kelly predicted Friday, it may have to become a "group" or "fan" page, based on the large and growing number of Facebook "friends" he's attracting.
"I have 4,737, and I get sometimes 25 to 50 (new friends) a day," the sheriff noted Friday morning. (The number had gone up by about a dozen more as of Sunday morning).
Among the users of his page, Kelly said, "I have people from all over the United States who used to live in Ohio," as well as many county residents (including reporters) who have realized that to keep up with late-breaking news from the sheriff's office, Kelly's Facebook page is often the first place to look.
For example, when hunters recently found the body of Denzle Stanley, an elderly man from Albany who had been missing since early January, many people first learned of this from Kelly's page.
The sheriff still uses older forms of communication - even the good old facsimile machine - to put out news releases to the media. But when something important like the Stanley situation occurs, he'll typically send out quick text-messages and tweets to local reporters, and also post an item on his Facebook page.
"We still send out the faxes, but many times I'm out of the office when I (first release the news)," he explained. He noted that by using Facebook, texting and Twitter, he can alert media to important developments more quickly.
"One of the problem with (faxed releases) is, it will be the next day," he said.
The sheriff has already attracted media attention for his use of social networking tools to keep in touch with the residents of Athens County, and help him do his job better.
In January, for instance, ABC News featured the sheriff in a story about Facebook's decision to partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to launch Amber Alerts for Facebook. The program lets Facebook users sign up to get missing-children notices specific to their state.
The ABC story noted that when a 16-year-old girl went missing from Athens High School, one of the first things Kelly did was log onto his Facebook account, to post details of her disappearance. Within hours, the story said, hundreds of people had "friended" the sheriff to post supportive comments and share information. (The teen was later located in Missouri.)
Kelly began with the standard personal page, he said.
"I started on Facebook the way everybody else did," he recalled. After his election in 2008, however, he started using the page to put out news bulletins quickly on situations such as weather emergencies. As more people became aware of this, he said, "people would Facebook me and say, 'What's our snow (emergency) level?'"
As interest in the page grew, the sheriff said, he began to realize that "it's a great avenue for getting information out," and also for keeping in touch with public opinion.
Kelly's page these days is abuzz with activity, with people posting comments, complaints, compliments, questions, and more, interspersed with Kelly's news flashes on drug busts, missing persons, scam alerts, and the like.
Kelly will also toss in personal observations, such as his recent complaint about a proposed $10 percent increase in vehicle title fees to boost the funding of the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
The sheriff's army of Facebook friends clearly use the page as a resource; one recent poster, for example, wanted to know what to do about someone stealing his mail. (Kelly directed him to file a report with the sheriff's office.) They also use it to sound off on what they do and don't like, and Kelly admitted sometimes the comments get heated.
"I look at that, because these are people in our community that are talking, and I want to know what they're thinking," Kelly said. "But if they say something derogatory about somebody, I'll delete it."
Sometimes a high-profile criminal case will spark intense comment, he noted, such as the case of a couple recently charged with having neglected to quickly seek treatment for an infant that suffered multiple broken bones. In that case, Kelly said, he had to remind people that the couple had not been charged with injuring the baby themselves, and in any case have not thus far been convicted of anything.
One county resident who says he takes regular advantage of Kelly's page is Mike Tinkham, owner of Tink's Automotive Center, a car lot in Nelsonville. Tinkham, who got onto Facebook to promote his business, said he uses Kelly's page to get reliable information when rumors start flying around the community about some big arrest or similar story.
"When there's a rumor about a story, it's easy to jump on there and go to his page, and see if he's got anything about it," Tinkham explained. "And that deflates any rumors."
Kelly's not the only county official to have taken advantage of Facebook, though he's probably the one making the most intensive use of it in connection with his job. Assistant county prosecutor Keller Blackburn, who has his own Facebook page - and more than 800 friends in common with Kelly - said that while he sometimes posts information on Facebook about his work as a prosecutor, it's not the main or sole focus of the page.
"I post certain information about the office, but I also post about other things, like why I like Ohio State, or what's going on in my life," Blackburn said. "Different people will use my page to contact me about situations they don't think are being investigated properly, or (offer) tips... I generally don't comment (on the page) about other prosecutors' cases."
Of course, Kelly is an elected official, and Blackburn has recently announced that he's running for county prosecutor. Will they be tempted to use the attention they've already earned with their Facebook pages as a campaigning tool? Both men said they wouldn't use their existing pages as campaign sites.
Kelly noted that the sheriff's office does have its own website, which includes official news releases and other information. If and when he decides to run again, he said, he'll set up a separate campaign Facebook page. He readily acknowledged, however, that in some ways, anything a public official does to get his face and work before the public can be seen as campaign-related.
" Virtually everything I do is political in nature," he said. "Everything I do is in some sense about getting elected, or re-elected... As an elected official, you can't really have a private life. Your life is owned by the public, and rightly so."
Blackburn, likewise, acknowledged that it's probably impossible to completely separate his identities as individual, county official, and candidate on his page, but did say he would certainly not use his current page as a campaign site.
While his site does include material related to his job, he said, "I try to keep certain things off there. It wasn't intended as a prosecutor's page, but it definitely does have something of that."
