Editorial

Social media in government

Social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Youtube or Flickr, provide a platform to create online communities to connect people and to share information. People can join, create a page, or create a group. Social media applications build on Web 2.0 technologies that are internet-based and designed to promote the content generation by the users and to facilitate the sharing and diffusion of information through social linking and interactions among people (O'Reilly, 2007).

Table 1 summarizes the basic technologies of the Web 2.0, the characteristic capabilities or functionalities of the Web 2.0, and the social media systems. The Web 2.0 basic technologies include the internet-enabled web as the native platform equipped with end-user interactivity using a client-based programming framework (e.g. AJAX framework) and server-based dynamic programming. The Web 2.0 is based on light-weight web services, not software applications, and provides browser-based Rich Interaction Application (RIA) experiences for the end users. These technologies enable organizations to achieve productivity through a set of capabilities called SLATES — Search capabilities for employees to effectively locate resources and knowledge; Linking employees and customers to develop social networks; Authoring by employees and customers to co-create and share contents and knowledge; Tagging to organize and connect content for effective sharing and filtering; Extensions to share complex multi-media content through plug-ins; and Signals to disseminate the content changes (McAfee, 2006). We can call these organizations with SLATES capabilities Enterprises 2.0 or Social Enterprises.

Social media (or social web applications) define a set of tools and systems that allow an organization to achieve these social capabilities, hence Social Enterprises. These include blogs, wikis, social networking systems (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), web-based communication systems (e.g., chatting, chat groups), photo-sharing (e.g., Flickr), video casting and sharing (e.g., YouTube), audio-sharing (e.g. Podcasts), mashups, widgets, virtual worlds, microblogs (e.g., twitter), social annotation and bookmarking of websites, and many more.

Davis and Mintz (2009) distinguish social media applications according to the following characteristics:

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  User-generated social content: Social media enable site visitors to submit contents that others can access.

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  Social networking: Users of social media join together in online groups and relationships, which allow them to see profile information about the people to whom they are connected and to share information. It provides a digital space for meeting and exchanging ideas, products, and information with others.

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  Collaboration: Users engage in conversations, co-creation of content, collaborative filtering, and collective action.

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  Cross-platform data sharing: Sharing content by transferring data across sites.

Doan, Ramakrishnan, and Halevy (2011) categorize different crowdsourcing social media systems depending on the activities and behaviors of the participating users and the artifacts they create:

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  Evaluating — reviewing and voting products or users, and tagging web content.

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  Sharing — building a collection of items, textual or structured knowledge that can be shared among users.

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  Networking — building social networks

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  Building artifacts — building physical artifacts such as software, textual knowledge bases, structured knowledge bases, and systems

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  Task execution — solve any problem (e.g., finding extraterrestrials, elections, finding people, content creation)

These common social media characteristics, such as end-user participation as co-creation of content and evaluation, collaboration-oriented problem solving through networking activities and content sharing, encourage government agencies to apply social media to achieve the Open Government Directive of the U.S. government, whose three major mandates are transparency, participation and collaboration (Office of Management and Budget, 2009, The White House, 2009). Social media use, examples, and policy implications by government can be found in Chun, Shulman, Sandoval, and Hovy (2010), Bertot, Jaeger, Munson, and Glaisyer (2010), and Bertot, Jaeger, and Hansen (2012).