By Kwasi Fraser

Well, while the feud between Mayor Cory Booker and Conan O’Brien was going on, Mayor Booker was still in the business of working for the city of Newark and getting things done.  MrSilver, the alias of one of the founding members of the social media search engine and analytics company, Samepoint (www.Samepoint.com), can attest to that. 

MrSilver owns a mixed used building in the City of Newark and has witnessed a significant spike in the water charges over the last two months, amounting to over an 1100% increase.  This increase was in spite of the fact that one of the apartments was vacant during this period and two of the commercial tenants occupy the building for at most 4 days per week.  After making several failed attempts to contact the City of Newark Water department, MrSilver decided to take his request for resolution to the social web. 

On Tuesday October 6th 2009, MrSilver posted the following Tweet at the Mayor of Newark “@CoryBooker I need your help, our water bill increased by over 1120% over the past 4 months. No one is returning my calls to resolve this.”  Within minutes the Mayor of Newark responded to MrSilver with “Please DM me your phone # & I’ll call 2nite. RT @mrsilver I need your help, our water bill increased by over 1120% over the past 4 months.”  MrSilver then shared his information with the Mayor and they both spoke on the morning of Wednesday October 7th, 2009. 

Following the conversation the Mayor’s staff escalated the issue and was able to coordinate and schedule an investigation with the City of Newark Water Department.  MrSilver expressed his gratitude to the mayor and his staff for the quick call to action, and remains hopeful that the issue will come to a speedy resolution.  The exchange, along with updates, between Mayor Cory Booker and MrSilver can be tracked via the below links:

http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=Water+Bill+Increased

http://www.samepoint.com/real-time.php?q=MrSilver