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Homework answers / question archive / Textbook Readings: Lee, Neeley & Stewart, Chapter 11: Internal Public Relations for Personal and Program Success Mergel Chapter 8: Participation 2
Textbook Readings:
External Video:https://www.mma.org/councillors-discuss-effective-...
By the mid-week deadline, answer each of the prompts with 3 paragraphs using concepts and citations from the text or your own research.
“You may be doing wonderful work, but if people do not know about it or understand its value, you are not changing their perceptions of public relations.”
When I used to work at the Massachusetts State House, as a Legislative Director, I always believed that the work of the State Rep. was important, many good things that happened behind the scenes and the hard work that was done for the greater good and was mostly unknown by the public, because we didn’t have a functional outlet to portray the work . One of the questions I asked myself was how do I capture the work being done and portray it to the constituents. I began creating a social media presence, reaching out to the media in the locality and also the macro Massachusetts news stations, Newspapers , familiarized myself with media contacts, created an email database for E newsletters, and made sure that meetings on various issues were captured in terms of a photograph that could be posted as an image on social media with a blurb. Everything that we worked THEN had a presence on social media. My motto was if there is no photo or post, it didn’t happen. ..That was almost ten years ago, and nothing has changed in that regard. In fact, PR now plays an even more essential and crucial role, and is actually necessary to communicate with the public and also stay relevant. I’m referring to political officials in my experience above, however the work of municipalities and state/federal agencies needs to be shared via Participation 2.0. The question becomes, HOW effective can Participation 2.0 BE, without a dynamic organizational culture that welcomes Collaboration 2.0?
1. Based on Chapter 11, please discuss below the public relations management functions as listed by the PRSA National Assembly, what specifically stood out to you the most when reviewing the functions? Why?
2. Discuss the differences between (external )Participation 2.0 & (internal) Collaboration 2.0 and their relevancy in PR.
3. Per their (MMA) website, "For 40 years, the Massachusetts Municipal Association has been bringing municipal officials together to articulate a clear and united municipal message, to develop and advocate for unified policies, and to share information and work together to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal service delivery. In short, the MMA is the voice of cities and towns in Massachusetts."
In the fall of 2020, Councillors discussed the EFFECTIVE USE of social media. This is a constant popular topic, and this presentation/video reviews the importance of digital technology and communication with the public.
Based on the video & PP presentation, what are the major takeaways? Did you learn anything new about social media usage on the local level?
Few things to be mindful of:
1. Please provide foundational background and detail as well as resources for your opinions & statements. ***Never assume the reader understands your POV, always explain it.
2. Please make sure you complete a Works Cited at the conclusion of your posts
3. Make sure you are answering all of the questions in the prompt with complete answers
ffirs.indd i 10/09/12 5:32 PM SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR ffirs.indd i 10/09/12 5:32 PM Join Us at Josseybass.com Jo Register at www.josseybass.com/email for more information on our publications, authors, and to receive special offers. ffirs.indd ii 10/09/12 5:32 PM The Instructor’s Guide for Social Media in the Public Sector includes a sample syllabus and PowerPoint slides. The Instructor’s Guide is available for free online. If you would like to download and print out a copy of the Guide, please visit: www.wiley.com/ college/mergel ffirs.indd iii 10/09/12 5:32 PM Essential Texts for Nonpro?t and Public Leadership and Management The Handbook of Nonprofit Governance, by BoardSource Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, 4th Edition, by John M. Bryson The Effective Public Manager, 4th Edition, by Steven Cohen et al. Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government, 3rd Edition, by Stephen E. Condrey (Ed.) The Responsible Administrator, 6th Edition, by Terry L. Cooper The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, 3rd Edition, by David O. Renz, Robert D. Herman & Associates (Eds.) Benchmarking in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors, 2nd Edition, by Patricia Keehley et al. Museum Marketing and Strategy, 2nd Edition, by Neil Kotler et al. The Ethics Challenge in Public Service, 3rd Edition, by Carol W. Lewis et al. Measuring Performance in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, by Theodore H. Poister Human Resources Management for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Strategic Approach, 3rd Edition, by Joan E. Pynes Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 4th Edition, by Hal G. Rainey Fundraising Principles and Practice, by Adrian Sargeant, Jen Shang & Associates Making Critical Decisions, by Roberta M. Snow et al. Achieving Excellence in Fundraising, 3rd Edition, by Eugene R. Tempel, Timothy Seiler & Eva Aldrich (Eds.) Managing Nonprofit Organizations by Mary Tschirhart and Wolfgang Bielefeld Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation, 3rd Edition, by Joseph S. Wholey et al. (Eds.) ffirs.indd iv 10/09/12 5:32 PM SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR A Guide to Participation, Collaboration, and Transparency in the Networked World Ines Mergel Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs ffirs.indd v 10/09/12 5:32 PM Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com Cover art by Marc A. Smith, Social Media Research Foundation, http://smrfoundation.org No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002. Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-118-10994-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22424-3 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-23737-3 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-26238-2 (ebk.) Printed in the United States of America first edition HB Printing ffirs.indd vi 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10/09/12 5:32 PM CONTENTS Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xv About the Author xvii PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR 1 1 Introduction 3 2 Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 9 3 Drivers for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 37 4 Barriers to the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 54 5 Regulations and Directives for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 71 6 Social Media Policy Considerations 89 7 Social Media Metrics 122 vii ftoc.indd vii 11/09/12 4:53 PM Contents viii PART TWO: SOCIAL MEDIA PRACTICES: PARTICIPATION, COLLABORATION, AND TRANSPARENCY ftoc.indd viii 145 8 Participation 2.0 147 9 Collaboration 2.0 180 10 Transparency 2.0 211 11 Future Development in Social Technologies in Government 232 Appendix: Overview of Social Media Accounts in the U.S. Federal Government 243 Glossary 265 References 271 Index 291 11/09/12 4:53 PM FIGURES AND TABLES Figures 2.1 Introductory Paragraph of the GAO Report on the U.S. Postal Service 11 2.2 The FBI’s News Blog 17 2.3 The FBI’s Facebook Page 18 2.4 iCommandant: Web Journal of Admiral Thad Allen 22 2.5 The White House YouTube Channel 24 2.6 The YouTube Channel of Congressman Mike Honda, 15th Congressional District, California 24 2.7 Election Night: A Candidate Behind the Scenes 26 2.8 A Typical E-Government Website 28 2.9 Providing Static Content on a Government Website 29 2.10 Social Media Hub of the Department of Defense 30 2.11 Providing for Social Technology Interactions on a Government Website 31 2.12 “Hooray Bloggers!”: A TSA Blog Post 32 2.13 A CrimeReports.com Map 35 ix ftoc.indd ix 11/09/12 4:53 PM Figures and Tables x 3.1 Strong and Weak Ties in a Social Network 41 3.2 Motivations for Using Social Networking Sites 42 3.3 Change in Internet Use by Age, 2000–2010 43 3.4 Trends in Individuals’ Sources of News (by percentage of respondents) 45 3.5 The Long Tail of Social Media Tools 52 4.1 Trust in Government and Views on National Conditions 55 4.2 Networked Government 59 4.3 Decision Making and Implementation in E-Government Projects 63 Bottom-Up Experimentation with the Use of Social Media Applications 64 4.5 Richness of Interaction for Different Communication Media 69 5.1 Dashboard Evaluating Performance on the Open Government Directive 77 Twitter Profile for Macon Phillips, White House Director of New Media 78 5.3 Library of Congress Announcement About Twitter Archive 79 5.4 The IT Dashboard 83 5.5 ExpertNet: A Wiki for the Open Government Initiative 84 6.1 Informal Network of Attention Among Social Media Directors in the Federal Government 91 Organization Chart for the GSA’s Center for Citizen Engagement and New Media 92 6.3 The GSA’s Web Content Site on HowTo.gov 93 6.4 The DOD’s Policy on Responsible Use of Internet Capabilities 96 6.5 LinkedIn for Navy Personnel 97 6.6 Information Clearance Process 98 6.7 The TSA’s Mission Statement 100 6.8 Introduction to the GSA’s Discussion of Its Terms of Service Agreements 102 The GSA’s Apps.gov 103 6.10 The Importance of a Commenting Policy 105 6.11 The EPA’s Commenting Policy for Facebook 112 4.4 5.2 6.2 6.9 ftoc.indd x 11/09/12 4:53 PM Figures and Tables 6.12 ftoc.indd xi xi Should I Respond Online on EPA’s Behalf? An Employee Guide 113 6.13 Designing Social Technology Policy and Strategy 114 6.14 An Example of the Push Strategy: A White House Tweet 117 6.15 An Example of the Pull Strategy: A Challenge.gov Tweet 119 7.1 Spot Check of Social Media Impact 125 7.2 The CDC’s Recalled Products Button 128 7.3 Tweeting the Cookie Policy 130 7.4 The FCC’s Experiment with Social Media Use 131 7.5 The FDIC’s Website After Incorporating User Feedback 132 7.6 How Social Media Use May Support an Agency’s Mission 135 7.7 NASA’s Klout Score 137 8.1 How SeeClickFix Works: Flowchart 154 8.2 A SeeClickFix Watch Area Defined by a Zip Code 155 8.3 Issues Reported by Zip Code on SeeClickFix 156 8.4 Using the SeeClickFix Issue Reporting Process on Facebook 157 8.5 Using the SeeClickFix Issue Reporting Process on a Mobile Phone 158 8.6 RichmondGov’s Citizens’ Request Page 160 8.7 City of Richmond Issue Statistics from SeeClickFix 161 8.8 2011 SeeClickFix Pricing System 162 8.9 100,000 Issues Reported on SeeClickFix, May 9, 2011 163 8.10 Top-Performing Cities in Citizen Responsiveness 164 8.11 Newspapers as Dissemination Channels: SeeClickFix on the Boston Globe Online 166 8.12 SeeClickFix Access Through an Elected Official’s Website 169 8.13 Harford County’s Innovation Portal 175 9.1 Hierarchical Knowledge Acquisition 183 9.2 Distributed Knowledge Sharing Using a Wiki 184 9.3 Diplopedia 193 9.4 DoDTechipedia 195 9.5 Intellipedia 198 9.6 GCPedia 200 11/09/12 4:53 PM Figures and Tables xii 9.7 The CrisisCommons Wiki 203 9.8 WikiplanningTM 204 10.1 Data.gov 213 10.2 Data and Apps 215 10.3 Apps Showcase on Data.gov 216 10.4 The FlyOnTime Application 216 10.5 Health Data Applications 218 10.6 Mobile Apps to Access Government Information 218 10.7 The NASA iPhone App 219 10.8 The Find a Health Center App 220 10.9 Bing Health Maps Merge HHS Data with Geolocation Data 221 10.10 State of Utah’s iPhone and iPad Applications 221 10.11 Using the SeeClickFix Application 222 11.1 236 A World Bank Data Visualization Tables 2.1 5.1 36 Overview of Guiding Regulations and Directives for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 85 7.1 Klout Scores of U.S. Government Twitter Accounts 138 7.2 Measuring Social Media Performance 143 8.1 Types of Public Involvement in Decision Making 152 8.2 Local, State, and Federal Open Innovation Platforms 177 9.1 Prominent Wikis in Government 191 Public Sector Information Reuse Initiatives 223 Use of Facebook by Federal Agencies and Departments, 2010–2011 244 Use of Microblogs by Federal Agencies and Departments, 2010–2011 246 Use of Web Logs by Federal Agencies and Departments, 2010–2011 248 10.1 A.1 A.2 A.3 ftoc.indd xii Overview of Differences Between E-Government and Government 2.0 11/09/12 4:53 PM Figures and Tables A.4 Use of YouTube by Federal Agencies and Departments, 2010–2011 250 Use of Flickr by Federal Agencies and Departments, 2010–2011 252 A.6 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ Home Pages 253 A.7 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ YouTube Accounts 255 A.8 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ Facebook Accounts 256 A.9 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ MySpace Accounts 258 A.5 ftoc.indd xiii xiii A.10 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ Twitter Accounts 259 A.11 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ Blog Pages 260 A.12 Federal Agencies’ and Departments’ Flickr Accounts 262 11/09/12 4:53 PM ftoc.indd xiv 11/09/12 4:53 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T his book would not have been possible for me to write without the generous support of many amazing government IT professionals who were willing to be interview partners in a longitudinal research project on the adoption and diffusion of social media applications in the agencies and departments of the U.S. federal government. They provided insights into their decisions surrounding the adoption and use of social media in their agencies. I would like especially to thank Jeffrey Levy (Environmental Protection Agency); Noel Dickover (Department of State); Tiffany Smith (Department of State); Brandon Friedman (Department of Veterans Affairs); Amanda Eamich (Department of Agriculture); Scott McIllnay (U.S. Navy); Read Holman (Department of Health and Human Services); Haley van Dÿck (formerly at the Federal Communications Commission, now at the White House); Chris Rasmussen, Don Burke, and Sean P. Dennehy (of the U.S. Intelligence Community); Neil Sroka (Department of Commerce); John Schueler (Department of Energy); Price Floyd (formerly at the Department of Defense); Scott Horvath (U.S. Geological Survey); Jeanne Holm (National Aeronautics and Space Administration); Dan Luxenberg (Food and Drug Administration); Mary Davie (General Services Administration); Katie Jacobs Stanton (formerly at the Department of State, now at Twitter); Thom Kearny and Nick Charney (of the Government of Canada); John Kamensky, Gadi Ben-Yehuda, and Mark Abrahamson xv flast.indd xv 10/09/12 5:33 PM xvi Acknowledgments (at IBM’s Center for The Business of Government); and also Ben Berkowitz, Bonner Gaylord, Dustin Haisler, Steve Lunceford, John Moore, Alex Howard, Justin Herrman, Kristi Fifelsky, Jed Sundwall, Mark Headd, Pam Broviak, and Michelle Gardner. I am especially grateful for the tireless support I received from the amazing women behind the General Services Administration’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement, DigitalGov University, and HowTo.gov team: Lisa Nelson, Tammi Marcoullier, and Rachel Flagg, and also for the efforts of Steve Ressler at GovLoop.com, who generously introduced me over and over again to his direct contacts in government. Many of the concepts in this book were tested and discussed with the participants in the executive education programs and students in the master of public administration program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. I am very grateful for the ongoing support of my mentors Jane Fountain and David Lazer, who encouraged me along the way—even at times when social media in government was considered a fleeting fad. I was also able to vet and try out many of my ideas with my coauthor for this book’s accompanying Social Media in the Public Sector Field Guide, Bill Greeves, chief information officer, Wake County, North Carolina. Bill is a true government innovator and a great sparring partner in this endeavor. At the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, the Dean’s Office, the Center for Technology and Information Policy (CTIP), the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC), and the Campbell Public Affairs Institute provided initial funding to cover the interview costs for my ongoing research project. flast.indd xvi 10/09/12 5:33 PM ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ines Mergel is assistant professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University. She was previously a postdoctoral research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Program of Networked Governance, and the National Center for Digital Government. Mergel teaches in the master of public administration program at Maxwell, where her courses address Government 2.0, new media management in the public sector, networked governance, and public organizations and management. Her research interests focus on informal networks among public managers and managers’ adoption and use of social media technologies in the public sector. In particular she studies how public managers search for, share, and reuse knowledge they need to fulfill the mission of their agencies. A native of Germany, Mergel received BA and MBA degree equivalents in business economics from the University of Kassel, Germany. She received a doctor of business administration (DBA) degree in information management from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and spent six years as a pre- and postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. xvii flast.indd xvii 10/09/12 5:33 PM xviii About the Author Mergel’s work has been published in a number of journals, including the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Public Affairs Education, and International Public Management Review. Her ongoing thoughts on the use of social media applications in the public sector can be read on her blog at inesmergel.wordpress .com and on Twitter @inesmergel. flast.indd xviii 10/09/12 5:33 PM PART ONE UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR c01.indd 1 10/09/12 5:27 PM c01.indd 2 10/09/12 5:27 PM CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION G overnment organizations are starting to use social technologies, such as social media, social computing, and collaboration platforms, to support their mission. Social technologies have not been as widely adopted as other forms of public information and communication technologies; however, early experimentation can be observed at all levels of government as agencies make the effort to reach out to government’s diverse audiences. Typically, these innovative technologies are adopted and used for three functions or purposes: (1) to increase transparency, (2) to support interand intraorganizational collaboration, and (3) to enable innovative forms of public participation and engagement. Government agencies and departments are using external social networking services, where the platform is provided by a third party and data are hosted on a third-party server or in the cloud. They are also using their own websites, which allows more control over technological features and easier data archiving and access. Both models pose challenges and in many cases adoption barriers for those agencies that might potentially be willing to follow early innovators. The use of social media applications is being driven mainly by innovative citizen use, and government organizations are slowly adopting the tools for connecting to their audiences where those audiences prefer to receive information and news on social networking sites (Schweik, Mergel, Sanford, & Zhao, 2011). 3 c01.indd 3 10/09/12 5:27 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 4 Purpose of This Book This book is based on exploratory interviews I conducted between 2009 and 2011 with social media directors in the agencies and departments of the executive branch of the federal government and with government IT professionals working on local and state levels, as well as with social media start-up entrepreneurs who are developing applications for use in government. The initial inquiry into the ways that new technologies are diffusing through the public sector was driven by work I conducted on the web practices of federal agencies and members of Congress during my time as a doctoral and postdoctoral Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and as a member of the National Center for Digital Government and the Program on Networked Governance (Lazer, Mergel, Ziniel, Esterling, & Neblo, 2011). These projects have led to further inquiries into the informal use of new technologies among government employees to fulfill the mission of their agencies (Bretschneider & Mergel, 2010; Mergel, 2005, 2010; Mergel, Lazer, & Binz-Scharf, 2008). Many entrepreneurial government employees are driven by a passion to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their own operations and are reaching out across organizational boundaries to learn from their peers in other agencies. They are helping each other out by sharing their local experiences with their global network and hoping to reduce redundancies (Lazer & Mergel, 2011). Social media applications are designed with the purpose in mind to connect offline contacts online on social networking sites. My observation early in 2008 and 2009 was that many government agencies started to experiment with social media applications outside their formal IT standards and even outside their safe and sanctioned environments—with the purpose of increasing the experience of citizens involved with them and providing a new form of customer service to these audiences. Much of the innovation was sparked as a result of the successful Internet strategies during the 2008 presidential campaign, and some of the early enthusiasm was then transferred into initial experimentations by social media directors, public affairs officials, and other IT professionals. Nevertheless, the early experimentation of first movers and intrapreneurs has shown that government regulations and existing policies hindered the fast and wider spread of social media adoption. The interviews I conducted, together with my interactions online with social media professionals on Twitter using the hashtag #gov20 and the conversations I was involved in on the social networking platform Govloop.com, have resulted in several c01.indd 4 10/09/12 5:27 PM Introduction 5 case studies. I analyzed the rich interview data with qualitative data analysis methods and social network analysis techniques. The analysis provided in-depth insights that I was able to test in order to deepen my understanding of how and why government IT professionals are adopting social media applications. Although many of the best practices examples presented in this book come from federal agencies, the lessons learned are also applicable by local and state governments and international governments where IT professionals are starting to implement social media. This book serves as a handbook for the use of social media in the public sector in a way that is grounded deeply in research, combining the existing practices in social media use in government with existing theories of public administration, networked governance, and information management. The intended audience includes both academics and practitioners who seek to gain a deeper understanding of the processes, intentions, managerial challenges, and actual applications of social media in government. This book can also be used as a primer in public affairs programs, business schools, or information studies schools. The order of the chapters reflects a course I have designed, taught, and refined since 2008 at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The pedagogical and theoretical approach, including in-class exercises, assignments, and a reading list for a fifteen-week course are outlined in an article published in the Journal of Public Affairs Education (Mergel, 2012). The syllabus is featured on education.data.gov and a frequently updated version with traditional and contemporary readings is available on my faculty page: faculty.maxwell.syr .edu/iamergel/government2-0.htm. For practitioners this book provides a deep dive into best practices and procedural aspects of the use of social media, but it also aims to explain the underlying theoretical dimensions of the ways in which social behavior affects adoption of social media technologies. I provide ongoing updates on new cases, emerging technology innovations, and presentation slides on my blog, Social Media in the Public Sector (inesmergel.wordpress.com). How This Book Is Organized Following this introduction, this book moves in Chapter Two to an overview of social media technologies in the public sector, providing definitions and explanations of the different technologies. The unique features of c01.indd 5 10/09/12 5:27 PM 6 Social Media in the Public Sector major, currently adopted social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, and Flickr, are discussed and contrasted with traditional e-government applications. Chapter Three then takes an in-depth look at what drives the current surge and adoption speed of social media applications in government, and Chapter Four details what are currently seen as major hurdles to the use of social media. Some of the challenges involve uncertainty regarding the applicability of existing rules and regulations. Most directives and policies cover the use of agencies’ websites, but do not extend to the use of third-party portals. Chapter Five outlines the evolution of norms and necessary regulations for the safe and responsible use of new media applications in government. Norms were institutionalized with a significant time lag in relation to emergent social media behavior, and government officials set structures in place as a reactive result of continuous social media use. The following chapters examine the organizational factors that support the implementation of social media practices in government. Findings from the adoption process of federal government agencies provide insights into how governments institutionalize the use of social media by moving from the use of early—and informal—experimentation to solid business cases in order to gain top management buy-in and then go beyond that to an institutionalized social media policy providing the context for all social computing activities. Chapter Six discusses the design of existing formal social media policies in government. A survey of publicly available documents and their year-by-year adjustments and extensions over time provide insights into the main content areas covered in policy documents. Topics include organizational roles and capacities, privacy regulations, information-vetting processes, account management, and day-to-day practices. None of the social media activities will survive in government if they are not directly connected to an agency’s mission and overall organizational goals. In order to be allocated organizational resources, such as personnel to administer social media accounts and to create content, social media activities need to be efficient and effective. Chapter Seven discusses existing impact evaluation and social media measurement techniques that are based on the current state of the art. In addition, this chapter suggests how the existing metrics can be extended with qualitative insights to increase the effectiveness of social computing activities. Part Two of this book then showcases the three purposes for which social media applications are used in the public sector: transparency, collaboration, and participation. Each purpose is discussed in light of the existing research c01.indd 6 10/09/12 5:27 PM Introduction 7 in public administration and the ways in which the innovative use of social media can facilitate the applications and goals of government. The current Open Government Initiative of President Obama highlights all three functions as priority goals for all ongoing, open government activities: 1. Participation 2.0. Public participation and, in parallel, citizen trust and satisfaction in government have dropped to historical lows (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2010). At the same time, existing engagement mechanisms attract Internet trolls, and not the average citizen, creating what I call the town hall divide. The social media applications discussed in Chapter Eight provide alternative public engagement mechanisms that help support the open government mandate for innovative forms of participation and public input solicitation (Mergel, 2011). 2. Collaboration 2.0. Cooperation and coordination within and across government agencies is highly difficult with the current bureaucratic set of organizational norms and, at times, competing missions. Government agencies have few incentives, and they may lack the technological means to share information effectively across organizational boundaries. Chapter Nine therefore looks at collaboration platforms that enable government to increase collaboration across agencies and with diverse audiences and constituencies. 3. Transparency 2.0 . Previous Open Government Initiatives have all attempted to increase the transparency of government records. The current use of open data and social media applications is also intended to increase the transparency of government decision- and policymaking processes. The cases provided in Chapter Ten show the first experiments in the smart reuse of public information and government datasets, without expensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The goal of Part Two is to provide insights into what can be called true lighthouse projects—outstanding and relatively uncommon initiatives that challenge the existing understanding of transparency, collaboration, and participation for government agencies. These projects serve as illustrations and starting points for future inquiry by researchers and practitioners. The adoption of social media applications in the public sector is still in its infancy. Even though the executive departments of the federal government c01.indd 7 10/09/12 5:27 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 8 were tasked in 2009 to find ways to “harness new technologies” (Obama, 2009), agencies are mostly still experimenting with the use of new technologies and are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. The outlook for the future of social media practices in government concludes this book, in Chapter Eleven. Additional resources, including web links, web logs, and freely accessible reports sorted according to main content areas are available in the Appendix. Companion Learning Resource This book has a companion field guide, Social Media in the Public Sector Field Guide: Designing and Implementing Strategies and Policies, coauthored with Ines Mergel by Bill Greeves, chief information officer for Wake County, North Carolina. Hands-on and practical, the Field Guide will help readers put into practice the concepts featured in this book. c01.indd 8 10/09/12 5:27 PM CHAPTER TWO SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR T his chapter defines the terms used to describe social media use in government and provides an overview of the current applications. First, the central features and tool-specific characteristics of the main social media tools are discussed, as well as the adoption decisions for each of the tools. The chapter then compares large-scale e-government applications and their characteristics to social media applications. De?ning the Terms Social Media, Social Software, Web 2.0 Social technologies have made their way into the public sector: During the 2004 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Howard Dean’s presidential campaign team successfully used MeetUp, a social networking platform, to help local volunteers organize meetings of campaign helpers without having prior face-to-face interactions (Wolf, 2009). What the MeetUp experiment showed in 2004 was the successful use of online social networking services to bring people together off-line. During the 2008 presidential campaign of then Senator Barack Obama, social media sites and content (such as YouTube videos, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, and the like) were used to reach constituents and potential voters with an unprecedented success rate (Carpenter, 2009). 9 c02.indd 9 17/09/12 1:29 PM 10 Social Media in the Public Sector Voters who were unreachable in previous elections were reached through their social graph—the connections they built on social networking services. This development informed Transparency and Open Government, a memorandum published a day after the president’s inauguration on January 21, 2009, in which President Obama instructed federal executive departments and agencies to “harness new technologies” to increase their participation, transparency, and intergovernmental collaboration activities (Obama, 2009). This mandate has started a new wave of use of social technologies on the federal government level, use that has been informed by existing local and state government initiatives that were subsequently adopted by federal departments and agencies. Originally designed for personal networking, social networking applications are also open to corporate or government use and are oftentimes used as a branding mechanism. For example, the White House has, in 2011, started to collaborate with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to host online town hall meetings. Many authors have also drawn connections between the effectiveness of the recent political uprisings in the Middle East—now known as the Arab Spring—and the use of social media applications. In countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, citizens used social media applications to organize themselves, spread messages, and discuss issues, whereas governments in these countries were not part of these conversations and were surprised by the scale of the uprisings. Similarly, the London riots during the fall of 2011 led government officials to consider shutting down and blocking Twitter access (DeRosa, 2011; Halliday, 2011). The popularity of social networking services in Western nations has significantly contributed to a change in the business models of the music and newspaper industries and also to a significant decline in the use of traditional mail services, such as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). With the rise of the sharing of news on the microblogging service Twitter and in Facebook’s newsfeed, the numbers of subscribers to paper newspapers have dropped significantly. Although the newspaper industry recognized the trend belatedly, it has now shifted its focus to digital subscriptions (Sulzberger, 2011). The push of Apple’s iTunes into digital, downloadable music has greatly changed the extent to which compact discs (CDs) are used. Government agencies are now finding they are in no way immune to these massive changes in the way that information is shared and consumed. As mentioned, the USPS is a case in point. With the increased use of electronic mail, text messaging on cell phones, and also direct messaging between users of social networking services, the number of messages on paper sent by traditional mail has declined drastically, leaving the USPS on the verge c02.indd 10 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 11 FIGURE 2.1. INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH OF THE GAO REPORT ON THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE Source: U.S. Government Accountability Of?ce, U.S. Postal Service: Mail Trends Highlight Need to Fundamentally Change Business Model (GAO-12-159SP), 2011, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/ d12159SP.pdf. of bankruptcy, according to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2011) (Figure 2.1). Web 2.0 has grown to be hyped in debates about innovation in governance. As in other areas of computer technology, the designation “2.0” indicates that a new generation has been developed, in this case a new generation of Internet network. Tim O’Reilly, widely credited with launching the term Web 2.0, defines it this way: “The network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences” (O’Reilly, 2005). Whereas the original purpose of social media tools was mainly for entertainment and activities oriented toward youths, such as MySpace’s music and fan base, these tools and their innovative use have evolved into influential systems that mainly aim to replicate off-line connections in c02.indd 11 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 12 an online world. For government agencies these tools have added to the existing tool kit of the previous generation of unidirectional technologies, where citizens were mainly forced to play the role of passive receivers of information—assuming that they were able to recover the information they were looking for on government sites at all. However, today’s social media tools empower citizens as content co-creators and as senders, not only receivers, of information who have direct interaction with government. Moreover, as I will show in many different examples throughout the next chapters, social media applications have the potential to bridge what is often labeled the town hall divide : average citizens with obligations for child care or other activities who would be unlikely to come to a town hall meeting at 5:00 pm are instead now able to watch a YouTube video of the meeting, chime in through a Facebook page or tweet their opinions, and increase their participation and engagement. Features of Social Technologies Social technologies can be distinguished from other forms of information and communication technologies by their unique technological features that support social interactions in real time. The terms social technologies, social media, and social networking are oftentimes used interchangeably to describe web services that allow users to create an online profile and that also enable user-generated content, crowdsourcing, and online collaboration (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Some social networking services are walled gardens, bounded systems that restrict access to content and contacts to subscribers only. Recent developments have shown that these boundaries have become semipermeable, allowing a degree of publicness that users can define for themselves. An example is the Washington Post’s social sharing service that automatically posts articles read by a subscriber to his or her Facebook profile, communicating that person’s activities and interests directly to his or her whole network. Recent research has shown that users do not use social networking sites to meet strangers (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). This activity is reserved for such niche sites as dating services. Instead, social media users are solidifying existing off-line relationships and are reconnecting with current and past face-to-face friends online. However, users do have overlapping friendship ties, and by articulating their social connections publicly, they may (re)discover individuals they won’t necessarily meet or reconnect with in their off-line lives (Haythornthwaite, 2001). These weak ties may become c02.indd 12 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 13 resources for new information about jobs or other valuable information that an individual’s set of local, off-line contacts might not have available (Granovetter, 1983; Granovetter & Soong, 1983). Social technologies allow users to communicate across platforms with each other. Facebook—currently the most popular social networking platform—allows users to share details about their location, share the types and content of news they have consumed, and share information with and build on trusted recommendations from other users. Facebook status updates can be automatically reposted to other sites, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, or to applications, such as widgets. Users on all social networking services have to create a publicly shared profile that is usually searchable through such search engines as Google or Bing. The profile page offers customizable fields, so that users can personalize their online presence to a certain degree. The only identification features are personal e-mail addresses, which are used to verify that the account belongs to a real person. Beyond that, users can choose a nickname in place of their real name to protect themselves and preserve some anonymity online. Especially during the early days of Google’s social networking service, Google1, there was a fair amount of discussion about the usefulness of an enforced “real name policy” for social networking profiles (Horowitz, 2011). Social networking services allow users to (semi-) publicly articulate their social network—sometimes referred to as their social graph (Narayanan & Shmatikov, 2010). For example, the per-default publicly available friends’ list of a Facebook user provides insights into the number and names of network nodes that user maintains, but other users can also derive the status of their friendship, the history (through joint membership in university networks), or the types of links maintained. The social graph—the aggregated network contacts—provides a new social awareness stream: users constantly update their status and share content such as newspaper articles and links to websites they pay attention to. All users who are direct contacts or who subscribe to the contents automatically receive these updates in their individual newsfeeds—alerting them to the content their contacts are paying attention to. This creates a constant influx of information and directs users to potentially valuable information that they should also pay attention to. This has two impacts: first, users tend to pay attention to information that flows through their trusted relationships; information is then snowballing through the network, becoming viral. Second, users move their search behavior to their social networks, their trusted relationships, instead of leaving their search results up to automated mechanisms of established search engines (Watts, Dodds, & Newman, 2008). c02.indd 13 17/09/12 1:29 PM 14 Social Media in the Public Sector This form of social search also has consequences for government: a recent study has shown that citizens turn to their trusted contacts on social networking sites for fact-checking purposes, before they react to news or official warnings. Especially in emergency situations, this lag in reaction time and in, for example, seeking shelter during a hurricane or earthquake could have fatal consequences. As a result, government agencies need to find ways to target social hubs in networks that are able and willing to vet information through their trusted friendship ties in real time. Users can subscribe to each other’s content feeds using RSS readers and thus can receive information without directly being connected to each other. Social networking services in their basic form allow for fast, bidirectional exchanges, oftentimes labeled real-time exchanges. Most platforms provide various forms of messaging: public status updates, direct messages between a limited number of users, or private chats. Users can reply and comment on updates and share information on other users’ walls, or they can use their direct contacts’ user names, so that updates are also posted to their contacts feed—a feature that provides visibility and helps to build a user’s reputation. Besides messaging and self-publishing, many of the social networking services allow for the co-creation of content that can be shared with the whole network. This feature is inherently collaborative and participatory and can help build online communities of interest around specific issues. Examples include wikis and other forms of collaboration platforms that can, for example, be used for national dialogues. For government the opportunity to tap into the collective wisdom of citizens and their user-generated innovative content is a huge latent resource that collaboration and open innovation platforms such as Challenge.gov are using (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005; von Hippel, 2005a, 2005b). Other platforms that inspire user-generated content are GovLoop and PatientsLikeMe. In addition to the technological features, cultural norms, ethics, and processes emerge around each social networking site and vary across sites. Major Social Networking Services Used in the Public Sector For a long time it was not clear why government agencies felt the need to participate in information sharing outside their protected and highly regulated communication systems. When I interviewed social media directors at these agencies and asked why they made the decision to use social media applications to reach their diverse audiences, the majority replied c02.indd 14 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 15 with a very similar slogan: “We have to be where the people are if we want to reach them” (Mergel, 2010), and one of them stated: “And these tools offer some new, well, . . . to this point not quite as new, but some different ways of reaching people and engaging in those conversations.” Operating outside their protected public relations and public affairs context gives social media directors in the public sector more freedom to choose the platforms where they see most of their audience members congregate and discuss issues that might potentially intersect with the work of government agencies and departments. Moreover, especially during the initial experimentation phase in 2010, no top-down decisions were guiding the initial decisions. Early adoption decisions about social media platforms were made without a mandate, the involvement of a traditional decision hierarchy, or elaborate and sophisticated requirements negotiated with vendors. Currently there are several hundred social media tools freely available, and the question is, How do social media directors make the decision to choose a specific tool? The majority of selection decisions happen based on quantitative measures. The more popular a tool is, the more likely it is that government social media professionals are considering its use for their mission support. More sophisticated decision making takes the mission of the organization into account. Social media directors over time realized that some of their initial experimentation did not support the organizational goals and switched course to other more appropriate tools: one of these directors said, “Now each tool of course has specific advantages, and we try to match the specific needs or the specific goal to the particular project, to the right tool.” The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) followed up in 2010 by negotiating terms of service agreements with social networking sites, making it safer for agencies to choose tools for their purposes (Aitoro, 2009; U.S. General Services Administration, 2010). (For a detailed discussion of regulations and directives for the use of social media in the public sector see Chapters Five and Six.) Networking via Facebook Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site in the world. According to Facebook’s statistics page, in 2011 the site had over 800 million users (Facebook, 2011a). Facebook itself does not make any statements about the varying degrees of activity of its users, but we may assume that there are several thousand unused accounts, one-time users, or even c02.indd 15 17/09/12 1:29 PM 16 Social Media in the Public Sector accounts canceled because their creators are deceased (Facebook, 2011a). However, more than 50 percent of the active users log on to Facebook in any given day. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. Facebook was founded in 2004 as an on-campus initiative to create an online address book of Harvard graduates and help them connect across dorms on campus. Initially, the site was only accessible with an @harvard .edu e-mail address, but it was then opened further—first to other dot-edu addresses and then to alumni and later on worldwide. Facebook allows a user to create a personal contact page, connect to other users through a reciprocated confirmation process, and to share content with those other users who are subscribed to the user’s newsfeed. The site has evolved during the last two years and now allows organizations to set up pages for their professional broadcasting and networking needs. Organizations’ pages are set up somewhat differently from personal account pages: users can subscribe to or like pages, but through this action they are not opening their personal updates to a government agency. In return users can endorse updates through the like function and can leave comments on updates posted by an organization, and thereby can directly interact in near real time with government officials and other users interested in the same issue. Another difference from personal account pages is that organizational pages allow the use of specific analytics that give an agency an overview of the number of views its page has received and the demographics of its subscribers. Facebook has quickly become the most popular social networking site used by government agencies, allowing them to get in direct contact with those parts of their potential audience that do not directly visit agencies’ official government websites. Asked why government agencies prefer Facebook and how it fits into their overall communication goals, one social media director provides the following analogy: The mission—[we have] similar reasons to why we’re in Facebook or Twitter—is again to be where the people are. So 400 million users now on Facebook for example [in 2010]. So you want to be there. So if people are searching for [the agency’s core task] stuff on Facebook, they find us. And we’re regularly posting links and stuff back to our own website, so it’s a way of leading . . . it’s really like being out at the mall handing out fliers saying, “Hey, come visit us.” But we’re at the mall, you know, we’re where the people are randomly wandering by; we’re not just sitting back in our office going, “Hey, come visit us; here we are.” . . . [We’re where everyone] can hear us. c02.indd 16 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 17 FIGURE 2.2. THE FBI’S NEWS BLOG Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Releases Images in David Parker Ray Case [Web log post], n.d., http://www.fbi.gov/news/news_blog/fbi-releases-images-in-david-parker-ray-case. Recently the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has joined Facebook and is using the social networking site to harness the resharing functionalities of the site. Updates are posted to the FBI’s news section on its website (FBI.gov), called the News Blog (Figure 2.2). The agency then reposts the same content to its official Facebook page, allowing its over 150,000 followers to reshare the post through their own networks (Figure 2.3). The reshared message then shows up in the sharers’ Facebook newsfeeds and is read by all those users connected to the original person who has shared the post from Facebook’s page. The message can snowball through each user’s network and has a potentially unlimited reach—supporting the crowdsourcing goal of the FBI. Asking the public to help identify the property recovered at a crime scene has led to comments from Facebook users such as the following: “Most of the jewelry that I have viewed so far on the Albuquerque page seems to be run-of-the-mill flea market and souvenir shop items. However, the necklace on the second page seems to be quite dramatic. I’m no expert c02.indd 17 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 18 FIGURE 2.3. THE FBI’S FACEBOOK PAGE Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI—Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI’s Facebook page], n.d., https://www.facebook.com/FBI. on jewelry, but it looks like it may be from Nepal. I would think that a family member might remember if a missing loved one wore such an item.” This comment highlights the potential insights government agencies can gain from using a crowdsourcing approach on their Facebook pages. Microblogging via Twitter Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters). The most popular of these services today is Twitter. The brevity of microblogs creates distinct opportunities and drawbacks different from those of a full blog. For government, Twitter c02.indd 18 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 19 messages might consist simply of references to online resources focused on an organization’s news, events, or other public information—pulling audiences back to an agency’s website (Mergel 2012). In the past three years Twitter has grown significantly, to over twentyfive million unique visitors in the United States. Currently, Twitter reports 140 million active user accounts in the United States, although many accounts are not following other accounts, about 25 percent of accounts have only one follower, and according to Katie Jacobs Stanton, vice president of market development at Twitter, about 40 percent of the users are never tweeting and only listening to online conversations (Stanton 2012; Twitter, 2012). News organizations, corporations, and recently also government agencies picked up the Twitter trend. Many government agencies maintain at least one Twitter account—some even manage multiple accounts, based on their operational needs and their diverse audiences. Agencies oftentimes use their Twitter newsfeed as a parallel publishing stream—repurposing existing formal announcements, such as press releases, to push them out through an additional channel. Similar to blogs, microblogging services can be used to distribute mission-relevant information. Beyond the distribution of information previously posted on blogs or on an agency’s website, microblogs have the additional advantage of reaching followers directly to create snowball effects, so that government agencies can reach potentially unlimited numbers of people. Twitter messages, called tweets, can be described as public conversations and not only are improving transparency and accountability but also, when used appropriately, are leading to increased inclusion of public opinions into policy formulation through information aggregation processes. Twitter can be used effectively to engage large numbers of citizens and create public conversations with an engaged, networked public. The outcomes of these conversations can be new insights and even innovations in the public sector, suggestions on how to make government more effective, or simply repostings of vital emergency information in areas that are beyond the direct reach of government. The common reputation of Twitter is that it’s frivolous, which isn’t the case. If it’s set up right, it’s a rich environment of lots of learning and sharing of important material. It’s not just “what I had for breakfast.” —Lee Rainie, director of the Internet & American Life Project of the Pew Research Center. (Used with permission.) c02.indd 19 17/09/12 1:29 PM 20 Social Media in the Public Sector Early on, Twitter made the impression that it lacked an imposed structure. According to its founder, that was part of a strategy to allow users to use the platform for their own purposes. Over time, Twitter has picked up some of the social structures and routines that its users have adopted— such as the hashtag symbol (#) and the abbreviation RT for a retweet—and made them part of the platform’s functionality. Asked why their agencies have started to use Twitter—a fairly new service whose benefit for agencies is not as intuitively obvious as that of the social networking platform Facebook, social media directors provided answers along the same lines: “Twitter, again [that is, like Facebook], was a leader in its field.” Initially some agency subunits set up their own Twitter accounts and experimented with them. As one social media director described this process: “Twitter became a tool that I became aware of, and so we started playing around with it, and as we played around with it, other people across the agency noticed and said, well, can we try this out? And we said sure, subject to some thinking and some discussion, sure, go ahead.” Across government, Twitter is used for many different purposes. Some agencies see it as an additional promotional and broadcasting channel and are using it mainly to recycle content that they have also posted to their website: One of the things that I’d been trying to push for the last, well, . . . I guess it’s over a year now, was developing a Facebook page and a Twitter page, especially Twitter, just to try to notify people of major events or major policy kind of statements or major press statements that we’re throwing out there. Back in . . . November, I revisited this with the senior executives here, and found that one of our sister organizations, the Office of Controller of the Currency, had been repurposing their press information on both Twitter and YouTube using Twitter feed, which just automatically sets everything; it automatically creates a Twitter and Facebook entry, based on an RSS feed. We coordinated our RSS feeds, about last . . . September . . . and after we did that, it kind of opened this up for us. We took a look at Twitter feed, approved [it], and I personally set up the Twitter and Facebook accounts, and had all that set up, and after I established that look, all we have to do is just really repurpose information that we had out there. . . . I think my senior execs were extremely concerned with anybody just going out there and putting anything. So we established strict controls over who has access to the page, how we’re going to update the page, you know, the Twitter account and the Facebook page, and what we’re going to use it for, for now. c02.indd 20 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 21 Other government agencies are taking a more relaxed position on how their subunits set up Twitter accounts and reach their own audiences by providing location-specific updates, as is the case at the Veterans Administration. Brandon Friedman, the VA’s director of online communications, notes: Another thing we’re doing with those platforms is that we’re rolling Facebook and Twitter out to all the VA medical centers. We’ve got over 150 VA medical centers, and we’re getting them all to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their core constituencies. Because what we found when we looked at our website traffic is that half of our traffic is actually going to the VA medical centers. So when people are looking for information on VA, they typically go to their VA medical center website. So we want those hospitals to be able to communicate with their patients using social media. [Used with permission.] Content Sharing on Blogs Web logs, or blogs, are similar to microblogging services in that they provide a mostly text-based, content-sharing service for government agencies that need to update their audiences relatively infrequently, perhaps once or twice a week (Wyld, 2007). Most of the existing free blogging services, such as Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress, allow users to easily create web content by typing into preexisting forms, hyperlinking their texts to other websites, and embedding other externally created content, such as videos or pictures. Blogs can be integrated into an agency’s website—either as a subpage of the official site or by automatically pulling updates from external blogging tools into a dedicated news section on the agency’s website. Blogs allow users to subscribe to the infrequent update through an RSS feed. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and describes a process through which users are alerted to an update made to a web log. Users can then access the RSS feed, either through a dedicated RSS aggregator, such as Google Reader, or by receiving alerts by e-mail. Government agencies and politicians have employed blogs as a way to offer updates and information sharing that are more informal in tone than official press releases, with their rather bureaucratic and restricted language. Blogs provide an opportunity for supplying personal accounts, sharing background stories, and using a combination of text and other visual elements to update the public. Consider for example the update c02.indd 21 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 22 FIGURE 2.4. ICOMMANDANT: WEB JOURNAL OF ADMIRAL THAD ALLEN Source: U.S. Coast Guard, iCommandant: Web Journal of Admiral Thad Allen, 2010, http://blog .uscg.dhs.gov. posted by the now retired commander of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, on his iCommandant blog, displayed in Figure 2.4. Although most agencies and departments are using web logs mostly to repost content such as press releases from their websites, others are also experimenting with blog entries that contain opinion pieces from a department’s director or administrators, updates on appearances, or other types of infrequent updates. Public users can then leave comments and discuss the content. Video Sharing via YouTube YouTube is a video-sharing platform that was acquired by Google. It allows its users to upload videos for free. Each video is assigned a unique URL that can be shared with friends; embedded on websites, blogs, or Facebook; or tweeted out via Twitter. Other users can rate uploaded videos, leave comments, and discuss the content of a video. Depending on the upload tool used, users can upload videos up to 2 GBs in size. Many videos go viral—meaning that at times millions of users are sharing a specific video c02.indd 22 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 23 through their social networks and accumulating millions more viewers. Currently three billion YouTube videos are watched per day, and according to YouTube’s blog, forty-eight hours of video are uploaded every minute (YouTube, 2011). YouTube reports 142 million unique visitors per day, making the platform one of the most popular content-sharing social networking platforms (YouTube, 2011). Government officials are using video sharing for multiple purposes. Some are posting videos as background information about issues, others are asking TV stations to release and post reporters’ interviews with agency directors, and some are reposting third-party content on their own YouTube channels. Some politicians are posting behind-the-scenes footage, shot not with professional video production equipment but with Flip Video cameras in their offices. Asked why government agencies are willing to post their videos on YouTube—thus storing them on Google’s server, in the cloud, rather than keeping them at hand locally—many social media directors report similar patterns of decision making: It wasn’t a single decision. You’re now looking back through layers of time that make it look like, OK, this is the way. We started talking about YouTube three years ago, because we have quite a video library, and we wanted to find a way to socialize and make it more easy for people to find, make it more easy for people . . . to share. YouTube was one of our first targeted sites we wanted to use. We pretty quickly realized that Flickr was basically the same thing for photos, so we added that into the mix, and then we looked at social networking. This highlights that decisions about social media adoption are not necessarily made with a broad stroke. Agencies don’t necessarily populate all the most popular channels at once, but start experimenting with platforms that fit their immediate needs—in this case a platform to socialize around specific video content led an agency to also explore other social media applications; it did not begin using all of them at once. The White House was one of the first government agencies to use its YouTube channel (Figure 2.5) to live stream a virtual town hall meeting, in 2009 (The White House, 2009). Many members of Congress now maintain their own YouTube channels—comparable to TV channels—where they frequently provide video updates (Figure 2.6). YouTube offers a true alternative to traditional TV and press coverage. On their YouTube channels, politicians and c02.indd 23 17/09/12 1:29 PM 24 Social Media in the Public Sector FIGURE 2.5. THE WHITE HOUSE YOUTUBE CHANNEL Source: The White House, West Wing Week: 10/28/11 or “We Can't Wait” [Video], 2011, http:// www.youtube.com/whitehouse. FIGURE 2.6. THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL OF CONGRESSMAN MIKE HONDA, 15TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT, CALIFORNIA Source: M. Honda, District Address: We Must Change Policy in Pakistan Through RSPN [Video], October 11, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/RepMikeHonda. c02.indd 24 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 25 government officials can keep content authority over statements they have made publicly and that might be quoted only in part or out of context elsewhere. They post their own statements or responses directly to YouTube, reshare the material on their own website and Facebook pages, and also tweet it out to their followers, including members of the press. Some agencies allow each of their subunits to create their own YouTube accounts or channels so they can more easily reach their specific audiences and knowledge experts. This results in a wide variety of accounts. Other agencies have made a conscious decision to concentrate all their YouTube content on one channel, either because they wish to combine their various audiences or because they simply do not have enough video content to share. One social media director said that knowing how to do video, as well as Facebook and Twitter, was “inherently [a] very different skill set from being able to know how to make announcements well. And so we want to keep that kind of more under control . . . both to concentrate the community, and to make sure that we had some quality control. That’s why we’re only doing one account for YouTube and Flickr. But people do know how to talk to their own publics pretty well actually around the agency, and so that’s why we like them to have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.” Table A.4, in the Appendix, provides an overview of YouTube use and number of subscribers for the federal executive departments and independent agencies. Photo Sharing via Flickr The most prominent photo-sharing service used by government agencies is Flickr, a company acquired by Yahoo. Flickr allows its users to create profile pages, upload their own pictures, and share these pictures out to other social networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter; it also enables users to embed Flickr pictures into blog posts, along with appropriate attribution of the source. Flickr was heavily used during President Obama’s presidential campaign, and the campaign shared behind-the-scenes pictures never seen before from a campaign trail or future president (see, for example, Figure 2.7). After the election, the White House started to use its dedicated Flickr account (www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse), abandoning the campaign account in order to abide with the existing rules and regulations. Flickr has quickly become the platform of choice for photo sharing for many politicians and government agencies. Asked why their agencies chose c02.indd 25 17/09/12 1:29 PM 26 Social Media in the Public Sector FIGURE 2.7. ELECTION NIGHT: A CANDIDATE BEHIND THE SCENES Source: Flickr, [Election night photograph], Barack Obama's photostream, November 4, 2008, http://www.?ickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/3009095726. Flickr, across the board social media directors provided compelling anecdotes, such as this: Flickr and video providing the rich content that shows in a vibrant way what it is we do . . . [and providing it] worldwide, is a great resource. We have a fantastic production studio here and photography support. We encourage students or researchers or just general interest folks to use whatever we have there. So it’s really providing a way of digital storytelling . . . what a press release cannot accomplish. Much of our social media and new media strategy is to put a face on what has often been a faceless or kind of anonymous or overbearing . . . bureaucracy. We found that putting a voice and allowing individuals to show their personality or compassion through posts, photos of going out, you know, into Africa and various agricultural development, what we’re doing in Afghanistan, really reaches people on a more personal level . . . you know, nobody sticks with a press release for more than two or three paragraphs at most. So [we’re] trying to be more effective that way. c02.indd 26 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 27 Differences Between E-Government Applications and Social Media The current public administration literature mainly focuses on largescale, government-initiated e-government projects, such as one-stop shopping portals or transaction-oriented websites (for an overview see Shea & Garson, 2010). The recent uses of social technologies were initiated mostly outside the traditional e-government realm, and government IT professionals as well as public administration scholars are still trying to understand the evolution and potential impact of this free exchange and coproduction of content. The initial use of social technologies has been a story of trial and error that has led many government agencies to stay hesitant instead of jumping on the bandwagon. Bretschneider and Mergel (2010) defined the new wave of social technologies as the fifth wave of adoption of new technologies in government (also see Mergel, 2010, 2011). In comparison to the previous wave of e-government applications, social technologies have one main differentiating feature: they allow government to interact with its diverse audiences in a bidirectional manner. Initially, e-government applications were mostly designed to educate and inform the public. Websites were designed as portals that followed an agency’s logic and mainly displayed information. In most cases government websites include a contact form through which a citizen can e-mail an agency, but that citizen rarely receives an immediate acknowledgment, and response times are relatively long. See, for example, Figure 2.8, a screenshot from USA.gov, a portal that features web links to other sites, sorted into various categories, but leaves little room for direct interactions. The government agency information distributed by means of a portal function or any other plain website format is therefore relatively static. The content is created by content specialists, such as the staff of a public affairs office, with the help of legal counsel, in a rigorous, informationvetting procedure. The original draft of a government memo or press release goes through several iterations before the final document is ready for release to the public. The final version of the text is then provided to a webmaster, who usually serves as the single point of access to an agency’s website. The webmaster uploads the text to the site and takes it down or changes it when requested to do so by the original content specialists. Changes occur with a time lag because they follow a vetting process similar to that for the original document. c02.indd 27 17/09/12 1:29 PM 28 Social Media in the Public Sector FIGURE 2.8. A TYPICAL E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITE Source: USA.gov, U.S. Government Information, by Topic, 2011, http://www.usa.gov. Moreover, traffic to an agency’s website is usually undirected—for many content providers in the agency, it is unclear who is finding the information they have made available on the web. In rare cases agencies have the ability and the right tools to make an assessment about their audiences’ behavior. Generally, agencies receive information only about click histories (that is, the number of clicks made on a specific page); rarely do they have access to the keyword searches that have led audience members to the agencies’ web content, or any other in-depth statistics about the type of users interested in that content. They also do not receive any information about how their audience is reusing the content (that is, reposting it to an online community, downloading it and distributing it through other electronic means, and so forth). More advanced forms of e-government pages include transactional functionalities, such as online payments for parking tickets, renewal of licenses, or submission of tax returns. The use of these online transactions depends heavily on citizens’ perceptions of the site’s ease of use. c02.indd 28 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 29 FIGURE 2.9. PROVIDING STATIC CONTENT ON A GOVERNMENT WEBSITE Formal press release Website E-mail to journalists and news organizations ? ? Source: Copyright © 2012 by Ines Mergel. All rights reserved. When a site does not appear easy to use, citizens will not follow through on their intentions to submit their tax returns online, participate in national dialogues, or submit their votes, and usage of these functions decreases significantly (Horowitz, 2011; Narayanan & Shmatikov, 2010; Tolbert & Mossberger, 2006). Rarely do e-government portals and websites provide opportunities for real-time information exchanges, and information is usually pushed out, instead of interactively shared and co-created with citizens (Figure 2.9). In contrast to e-government websites, social technologies allow for close to real-time feedback cycles. For example, subscribers receive updates posted to the social networking site Facebook in real time in their personal newsfeed. They see immediate reactions from other subscribers and can leave their own feedback for the page owner to respond to. As soon as users subscribe to a specific news source, they also receive immediate updates about who else has left comments and they can rate each other’s comments. For government agencies these reflexive feedback mechanisms increase interactions with citizens and allow the agencies to engage in new forms of information sharing. Social technologies create the potential for innovative interactions with an agency’s audience. An example of this is that agencies can ask direct questions about an issue on Twitter or Facebook and invite the public to discuss the issue. Moreover, government content specialists can respond to citizens’ questions immediately—the response then pops up in a citizen’s newsfeed, where he or she also receives updates from social contacts, newspapers, brands, favorite TV shows, and so forth. c02.indd 29 17/09/12 1:29 PM 30 Social Media in the Public Sector The main distinction between relatively static e-government sites and highly interactive and self-updating government social media accounts is the directionality of information sharing. In the case of e-government sites, the agency is the sole provider of authorized information, pushing it out through the website, with no direct interaction with the information consumer. In the case of social media technologies, government is still the provider of authorized and vetted information, but in addition citizens are able to reuse, reshare, and discuss the content provided by the agency. Government is the main actor in the information process but allows citizens to interact with the content—potentially creating additional value as they discuss issues and provide innovative insights for government. Consider for example the screenshot of the social media hub of the Department of Defense in Figure 2.10. Price Floyd, former special advisor for international FIGURE 2.10. SOCIAL MEDIA HUB OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE Source: U.S. Department of Defense, Social Media@DoD, January 20, 2010, http://www .defense.gov/socialmedia. c02.indd 30 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 31 communication at the U.S. Department of Defense, points out that social technologies not only permit government to push out information into the ether but also allow government to listen to ongoing conversations, respond when necessary to provide correct information in case rumors are spreading, and generally feel the temperature surrounding the issues discussed (Watts et al., 2008). Overall the initial content creation process of formal government information stays the same. What the additional social media channels provide are innovative conduits through which information (often the same information that is available on a website) is provided on third-party platforms. Interaction with that content is bidirectional (Figure 2.11). In addition to carrying out the educational and informative purpose of supplying information, social media applications allow discussions about that information. Moreover, agencies can proactively start dialogues, allowing informal exchanges very close to the formal processes and outcomes of the formal work government agencies conduct. Innovative insights and also results from general polls can help to create actual value for government; ideas about cost cutting or suggestions for process change can inform future government decision making. FIGURE 2.11. PROVIDING FOR SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY INTERACTIONS ON A GOVERNMENT WEBSITE Participative feedback loop Social networking sites • Twitter • Facebook • YouTube, Flickr • Blogs, RSS feeds • And others Formal press release Website E-mail to journalists and news organizations Citizens ? ? Source: Copyright © 2012 by Ines Mergel. All rights reserved. c02.indd 31 17/09/12 1:29 PM 32 Social Media in the Public Sector Consider for example the following incident. Travelers discussed varying treatment they received from security personnel at airports on the Transportation Security Administration’s blog (at blog.tsa.gov) and highlighted procedural differences in their comments. TSA responded with the blog post shown in Figure 2.12, showing that the agency listened to citizens and used the concerns raised by bloggers as an indicator for necessary change in its internal procedures. FIGURE 2.12. “HOORAY BLOGGERS!”: A TSA BLOG POST Source: Transportation Security Administration, Hooray Bloggers! [Web log post], February 6, 2008, http://blog.tsa.gov/2008/02/hooray-bloggers.html. c02.indd 32 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 33 Unstructured and emergent social media content is oftentimes disconnected and disintegrated from the formal work government agencies are conducting on a daily basis. The TSA showed that its use of social media is no longer disconnected from its formal, structured, and predefined processes; instead, this usage has delivered business value and changed formal procedures. Publicly announcing the impact citizens’ contributions to an agency blog had on that agency’s standard operating procedures might in turn lead to increased transparency and accountability—and might also increase the willingness among citizens to engage with government in the future. Trust in government operations may increase as a result. Government 2.0 Ecosystem Agency use of social technologies did not emerge in isolation from other developments. Instead, following their first experiments with social media, government IT professionals labeled their movement Government 2.0— reflecting Web 2.0 applications and indicating that they are (oftentimes outside the formal government context) experimenting with the use of social media. The term Government 2.0 was coined by William Eggers in the pre-Web 2.0 era (Eggers, 2005; Eggers & Dovely, 2008). In his use of this term, Eggers focused generally on the use of technology to increase transparency and participation in government but did not mention social media. Tim O’Reilly then picked up the term and extended its original definition, promoting the view that government serves as a platform: agencies provide the data and the public is free to reuse it, design web and mobile phone applications around innovative use of public data, and provide the applications for free to the public and to government (O’Reilly, 2005, 2010). I define Government 2.0 as the use of social technologies to increase participation, transparency, and interagency collaboration in the public sector. Prominent tools are, among others, social networking platforms, content creation and sharing tools, web logs, and microblogging tools that allow for a bidirectional information exchange within government organizations and in government interactions with citizens. The main differences from previous e-government web applications are a higher degree of interactivity and of content production by both government and citizens (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008). These new technologies are being used both internally and to target Internet-savvy citizens and can reach users who are not using the traditional ways of interacting with government. The U.S. c02.indd 33 17/09/12 1:29 PM 34 Social Media in the Public Sector General Services Administration has negotiated and signed agreements with social media providers so that agencies can use these services for free to reach out to citizens (Aitoro, 2009). DEFINITION OF GOVERNMENT 2.0 The use of social technologies to increase participation, transparency, and interagency collaboration in the public sector. Prominent tools are, among others, social networking platforms, content creation and sharing tools, web logs, and microblogging tools that allow for a bidirectional information exchange within government organizations and in their interactions with citizens. The first two years of this Government 2.0 movement have shown that the use of social media applications challenges the existing standard operating procedures: A new information-sharing paradigm has evolved, moving from a need-to-know to a need-to-share basis (Dawes, Cresswell, & Pardo, 2009). The existing bureaucratic, linear, and relatively restricted information-sharing procedures are disrupted by information created outside the defined organizational reporting structure: Citizens and other stakeholder groups are coproducing innovative knowledge by leaving comments on blogs, tweeting government information, informing each other using Facebook pages and groups, posting YouTube videos, or reaching out to government organizations through citizen-initiated applications such as SeeClickFix. These rather disruptive activities occur in innovative environments, such as the university-public partnerships at Manor Labs, Texas, or are incentivized by government awards and contests, such as Apps for Democracy or Apps for America. Moreover, the “rock stars” of this new use of social networking are those who spend their free time developing and coproducing applications and websites to reuse government-produced data (such as MyTweet311, GovLoop, or MuniGov2.0); these apps and websites serve as incubators for innovation in government (Kamentz, 2010). One of these influential developments is the Open311 movement—a collaborative effort to create open standards for 311 services (see www .open311.com). Open311 services connect 311 data collected by governments with location-based data to create more effective public services. For example, CrimeReports.com works with data police departments collect and displays it on maps of neighborhoods (Figure 2.13). c02.indd 34 17/09/12 1:29 PM Social Media Technologies in the Public Sector 35 FIGURE 2.13. A CRIMEREPORTS.COM MAP Source: CrimeReports, New York City, 2010, http://www.crimereports.com. The Government 2.0 movement therefore does not include only government innovations but also innovations that are crowdsourced among citizens or civic hackers. Government 2.0 Barcamps, or unconferences, helped to organize the movement and resulted in initiatives, such as CrisisCommons, and also start-up opportunities, such as SeeClickFix, to engage citizens in community issues. These examples show that Government 2.0 has developed itself from a “Wild West” in the use of open data and social media applications to an organized movement and has even produced a convergence and consolidation with tangible outcomes, such as public services, with value for all citizens. Summary: Social Technologies in the Public Sector Table 2.1 summarizes the differences between e-government approaches to technology and the use of social technologies by government agencies (that is, Government 2.0). c02.indd 35 17/09/12 1:29 PM TABLE 2.1. OVERVIEW OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN E-GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNMENT 2.0 c02.indd 36 E-Government Government 2.0 Main goal • Delivery of government services online (transactional). • Creation of emergent, bottom-up initiatives: Citizen-driven. Employee-centric. Status • Content consists of ?nal, tested, and vetted versions. • Most of the time, requires large ?nancial investments and is long-term. • Approach is perpetual beta, subject to changes by third-party website providers. • Is typically low-cost and short-term. Feedback mechanisms • Surveys of focus groups done infrequently and with limited customers. • Continuous detailed feedback received from online publics. Authority over knowledge and information • Authority held by knowledge experts. • Higher levels of control over content; developer-centric. • Both government experts and members of the public hold authority: co-creation is desirable; control is held by both government and public participants; ?nal decision to use knowledge is limited to government. • Lower levels of control and managerial coordination. Interaction • Push. • One-way communication. • Low interactivity. • Pull. • Listen; engage; allow comments, polls, and voting. • Possibility of bidirectional interactions. Targeting of audiences • Aimed at broad masses: “the public.” • Personalized. • Channel approach. • Clear understanding. Measurement • Purely quantitative, with limited access to detailed user behaviors and identities. • Real-time data, “temperature,” reach, numbers, qualitative data about opinions, attitudes. • Analysis of audience and demographic data possible. Tactics • Informational and educational. • Reactions based on e-mail responses, press coverage, and anecdotes. • Strategic campaigns. • Evaluation conducted on a continuous basis, with direct intervention possibilities. • Re?exive feedback mechanism exists: offering immediate impact and real-time information. 17/09/12 1:29 PM CHAPTER THREE DRIVERS FOR THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR W hat is driving adoption of social media among public sector agencies? Use of social media is slowly growing and evolving in government, but too often social media are still considered merely a fad. When adoption does occur, the drivers include the ease of social media use, existing adoption decisions made at the individual level (by citizens and many government employees), and emergent social behavior that is resulting in new social structures related to the use of innovative technologies. This chapter takes a closer look at the behavioral, technological, and economic drivers that influence the adoption of social media in the public sector. It includes some of the perceptions of current social media directors in federal agencies, highlighting their reasons for adopting new technologies to support their agencies’ missions. The current use of social media applications in the public sector suggests two distinct trends. Some government organizations are extremely hesitant to jump on the bandwagon and provide only a single online access point—a web contact form—for the public. Other agencies are diving headfirst into the use of social media channels and are distributing their web presences across multiple accounts on social networking sites, extending their reach and digital visibility across the web. The following observation from a federal social media director highlights how some agencies worked through their initial hesitance: “Initially some thought it was just 37 c03.indd 37 17/09/12 1:37 PM 38 Social Media in the Public Sector a fad and would detract from the press mission. But I was able to argue for social media as a supplement—to supplement our communication as an ‘and also’ approach as opposed to an ‘and/or’ approach.” What the apparent popularity of social media tools in the public agencies where they are being used indicates is that government has an increasing need to create, distribute, and collect information outside the traditional communication mission. Government agencies know the importance of informing or educating the public about an agency’s mission. The communication strategy that relies on press releases is heavily hierarchical and its information-vetting processes are outlined clearly, leaving little room for informal exchanges with either public affairs personnel or knowledge experts located deep in an agency’s hierarchy. Clearly the most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people communicate and collaborate at a peer-to-peer level (Benkler, 2006). Moreover, these changes have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations fulfill their missions and communicate with each other and with citizens (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2011). But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional context within which these technologies are or will be deployed. (Read more about these hurdles and challenges in Chapter Four.) In other words, it is not the technology that might keep public sector organizations from transforming and innovating—it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome (Fountain, 2001; Tolbert, Mossberger, & McNeal, 2008). In many ways, social media use in the public sector can be seen as a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973); having little or no initial formal guidance, government IT professionals have had to experiment with the application of social media. This has exposed them to a very high degree of uncertainty and risk taking. At first, norms and regulations covered only online practices on official and institutionalized government websites or e-mail traffic. But after several years, regulations and policies for the use of third-party sites followed. Once government organizations start to use social media sites, they find themselves in a continually reactive mode as information and feedback from the public arrive. Moreover, platform providers are changing their services and privacy settings, so that new government policies and standard operating procedures have to follow as soon as the provider-based changes are discovered. Innovative behavior and social structures are user driven. Overall, the responsible and effective use of social c03.indd 38 17/09/12 1:37 PM Drivers for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 39 media applications represents a complex problem that necessitates high degrees of experimentation. As a result, government is only slowly adopting social media use into its standard operating procedures. As one government IT professional responsible for social media use says: “For me, social media is about one one-hundredth of my time. I just do it on the side.” Even though social media comes with a lot of challenges and risks, government agencies have started to dive into online social networking. Three categories of drivers foster the adoption of social media applications in the public sector: behavioral, economic, and technological. Each of these sets of drivers is discussed in the following sections. Behavioral Drivers Behavioral, or social, drivers are indirectly reflected in the desire of the generation of so-called digital natives to create their own content and share it with their friends and online contacts—oftentimes with few hesitations about how their public selves will be displayed (Gasser & Palfrey, 2008). Citizens have been setting up online presences, often on multiple social networking sites, such as MySpace, Friendster, or Facebook, or on microblogs and blogs, such as Twitter, Blogger, WordPress, or others. These sites allow every citizen, with or without programming skills, to set up a public representation and stay connected to friends. A case in point is the use and sharing of digital video or pictures. Previously, the creation and dissemination of this kind of online content was primarily reserved for highly skilled and tech-savvy early adopters. User-generated videos are still being produced by a relatively small number of people, but through low-tech distribution and access procedures (such as YouTube), these videos are being viewed by a very large number of people. Increasingly, this development is also spreading across age groups and is no longer unique to the MySpace generation. Especially during the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, more and more citizens were becoming involved in political engagement such as political opinion building through social networking sites and blogs and the integration of online and off-line contacts (consider, for example, Moveon.org, Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s Facebook groups and profiles, and causes applications). This movement in electoral politics convinced public sector organizations to consider the use of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as well ( Jordan, 2009). c03.indd 39 17/09/12 1:37 PM Social Media in the Public Sector 40 Strength of Weak Ties Supporting Social Media A recent research study published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that Americans have various motivations for using social networking sites. Most of them are creating an online profile to stay in touch with existing friends (67 percent) or family members (64 percent) or to reconnect with friends they have lost touch with (50 percent) (Fretwell, 2010). Social networking sites are therefore being used to replicate some of the off-line interactions with friends with whom users are maintaining strong ties. Social networking sites are used to reinforce already existing (off-line) relationships. In addition the study shows that half of the users included in the study also use social networking services to reactivate ties that have become weak over time. These are ties that bind people based on a common attribute that allows them to connect to each other frequently or feel a strong connection to each other. Based on this sense of likeness, people then tend to communicate more often—or because they have a strong sense of belonging they can provide emotional support for each other even though they do not have the opportunity to meet in person (Granovetter, 1973, 1983). For example, Facebook is often used to reconnect with college friends who have moved to other parts of the country or to stay in touch with friends in one’s former hometown. These weak ties can be reactivated with the help of Facebook or even Twitter. Even though the frequency of interaction might not change because of mere online contact, the potential resources that might exist in a weak tie—such as social or professional support—can be helpful for future interactions. Figure 3.1 illustrates how strong and weak ties combine in the social networks of most individuals. Social networking sites are less frequently used to meet strangers. As a graphic from the Pew research report mentioned earlier shows (Figure 3.2), people have various motivations for using these sites, and online dating or connecting to new online contacts who were not previously off-line contacts plays only a minor role for users as a motivation to create an account on a social networking site (affecting only 3 percent of users). Increased Social Awareness Among Government Of?cials Following this apparent trend among citizens and private users, many public sector organizations have started to build a virtual representation of their organization on social networking services. They use the technologies that their constituents already use, rather than making their constituents c03.indd 40 17/09/12 1:37 PM Drivers for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 41 FIGURE 3.1. STRONG AND WEAK TIES IN A SOCIAL NETWORK Strong ties Weak ties Local network Source: Copyright © 2012 by Ines Mergel. All rights reserved. come to them (for example, through an e-government website), and thus they allow people to communicate with them by using Facebook or Twitter or other social networking sites. As one social media director in the federal government explained in 2010: “Why we are on Facebook or Twitter: to be where the people are. So [there are] 400 million users now on Facebook for example, so you want to be there. When people search for . . . stuff on Facebook, they find us.” Nevertheless, as I have discussed, adoption of social media applications by U.S. government agencies is happening only after a significant time lag, and it is triggered by events, rather than by a conscious, top-down decision by top management. For example, the so-called social media revolutions during the Arab Spring in 2011 have increased awareness among government officials that social media applications can be used successfully to coordinate and manage citizens and represent their needs with one voice (Lazer, Mergel, Ziniel, Esterling, & Neblo, 2011; Mergel, 2012). c03.indd 41 17/09/12 1:37 PM FIGURE 3.2. MOTIVATIONS FOR USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES 100 9% 13% 13% 90 80 24% 23% 50% 57% 70 36% 74% Percent 60 84% 50 Not a reason Minor reason 40 67% 30 64% Major reason 35% 34% 50% 20 20% 10 0 14% Staying in touch with current friends Staying in touch with family members Connecting with old friends you’ve lost touch with Connecting with others with shared hobbies or interests 13% 9% Making new friends 5% Reading comments by celebrities, athletes, or politicians 3% Finding potential romantic or dating partners Note: Findings are from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, April 26 to May 22, 2011, Spring Tracking Survey; n ? 2,277 adults ages eighteen and older, including 755 cell phone interviews. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Margin of error is ?/–3 percentage points for social networking site users (n ? 1,015)—adults who use sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Source: A. Smith, Why Americans Use Social Media (Pew Research Center, 2011), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Why-Americans-UseSocial-Media.aspx. All PEW graphics are used with permission. c03.indd 42 17/09/12 1:37 PM Drivers for the Use of Social Media in the Public Sector 43 The trends in motivations and generally in the use of social networking sites are also evident in the change in Internet use during the last ten years. Although the use among teens has increased slowly (from 75 percent to now 93 percent), the major increase has happened in the older age groups, who represent the majority of voters and taxpayers, as shown in Figure 3.3. These trends have led to increased acceptance of .
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