As local governments pour efforts into social media (SNS) promotion fronted by their own officials, moves to cultivate a "second Chungju man" are spreading. In contrast, there are complaints about being mobilized for unwanted SNS promotion and concerns about exposure of private lives.
According to Gunsan City on the 15th, Assistant Deputy Director Park Ji-su (Grade 9), who runs the city hall YouTube channel, received a special promotion to Grade 8 on the 13th. It is an "unprecedented" promotion achieved just one year after joining, for a Grade 8 step-up that typically takes about three years.
Assistant Deputy Director Park put a face to Gunsan's official YouTube and Instagram to promote local food and city affairs. Park's voter-encouragement video topped 1.33 million views, and an Instagram clip introducing local eateries recorded more than 3.2 million. Considering Gunsan's SNS following of 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers, the promotional impact was high.
A representative case of a local government hitting the jackpot by putting officials at the forefront of promotion is Chungju. In 2019, Chungju launched its YouTube channel and assigned then-Grade 9 Assistant Deputy Director Kim Seon-tae to run it.
The "coffin dance" video that Assistant Deputy Director Kim shot during the COVID-19 period surpassed 10 million views, and subsequent videos also garnered millions of views. Chungju's YouTube channel has 950,000 subscribers, more than four times the local population. As a result, Assistant Deputy Director Kim achieved a "blazing-fast" promotion to Grade 6 in seven years, which on average takes 15 years. Last year, Kim became head of Chungju's new media team.
After Chungju's success, multiple local governments, including Andong in North Gyeongsang and Nam District in Ulsan, rushed to build SNS promotion teams and jumped into producing content that puts individual officials at the forefront. It is known that most of the 226 local governments nationwide now operate their own SNS.
Subjects range widely, from videos promoting local specialties, food, and events to lifestyle information content. Unlike the stiff image of the civil service, many say the planning is fresh.
However, some inside the civil service say the mood is not all positive. On online communities, there are posts saying it is uncomfortable that ordinary officials are being pulled into video production.
An official at a local government said, "When a higher-up (senior official) suddenly asks me to produce a video, I don't know what to do." Another official lamented, "Who would want to show their face online?"
In fact, when a video of an "official who looks like a girl group member" went viral online, an acquaintance raised a dispute over "unauthorized use," prompting the local government to delete the post.
Aware of such side effects, some local governments are turning to "VTubers (Virtual Youtuber)," meaning virtual YouTubers, for promotion. Gangseo District in Seoul unveiled a virtual civil servant character in 2023, the first in the nation, and recorded 100,000 views within a week. Gangseo later introduced a second VTuber, choosing a way to achieve promotional effect without exposing faces.
A local government official said, "Using officials' SNS has taken root as a new trend driving regional promotion," adding, "However, because there is also a sense of relative deprivation among officials in charge of policy work, we need to prioritize voluntary participation by individuals and back it up with balanced personnel measures."