Challenges
and Opportunities of Adaptability of Social Media Practices in Government Organizations
in India
Nibedita
Sahu
KIIT School of Management, KIIT University,
Bhubaneswar, Odisha
sh.nibedita@gmail.com
Effect of social media on brand loyalty and brand awareness
of the consumers is an emergent concept. Organizations are now focused on
enhancing customer experience to create “brand loyalty bond” with their clients.
In the 21st century, brands need to have a social story to leverage the
emotional and persuasive elements that make offerings lucrative. It offers
opportunity to government bodies to provide prospective platforms for 1)
"voice to all" 2) immediate outreach 3) 24x7 engagement connecting
stakeholders especially citizens 4) make information available on public
services 5) make policy formulation citizen-centric 6) create community based
programs 7) facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, and connect
to citizen touch-points to create a consistent government experience. The
article discusses the evolution of social media and its adoption by private
organizations as well as government organizations which are an untapped
territory until now. The feasibility aspect of social media adaptability by
government entities, keeping in focus challenges like organizational
complexity, steep hierarchical structure, willingness quotient of government
workforce, ambiguity in delegation of authority, chances of information
mismatch etc are discussed at length. The article also attempts to suggest a
few practical guidelines for social media adaptation by government
organizations in India.
1.
Evolution of social media
Social
media boom is hailed as the best innovation model for global communication in
the 20th century. It brings along with it a futuristic change in organizational
communication & interaction pattern. It has the potential to fundamentally
change the character of our social lives, both on an interpersonal level and a
community level. The traditional media marketing tools of television and
newspapers are facing increased competition from the more attractive
alternatives provided by social media. Instead
of spending money on a marketer, the social media has evolved the ways of
communication and enabled people to market for free, even with the possibility
of putting a personal stamp on it. It has brought about a paradigm shift in
consumer interaction & consumer behavior.
Changes in
interaction patterns and social connections are already evident among young
people, who are the heaviest users of these sites. As adoption spreads to a
wider audience, we expect such changes to be amplified across all segments of
society. On a community level, the organizing features of these sites lower the
transaction costs for finding and connecting with others on critical issues
touching our lives.
Quoting
ALEXA et. al.1998, “Whereas in traditional advertising, the presentation is
linear and the consumer is passively exposed to product/service information,
for interactive advertising, the consumer instead actively traverses the
information, so it has become imperative for all firms to engage, interact,
communicate, work together with all stakeholders of the firm i.e. consumers,
suppliers, traders, employees, and to the society as a whole. To get a focused
definition of social media, I would quote Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein
who define Social Media as "a group of Internet-based applications that
build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that
allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". According to
Bertot et al. (2010), “Social media has four major potential strengths:
collaboration, participation, empowerment, and time. Social media is
collaborative and participatory by its very nature as it is defined by social
interaction. It provides the ability for users to connect with each other and
form communities to socialize, share information, or to achieve a common goal
or interest. Social media can be empowering to its users as it gives them a
platform to speak. It allows anyone with access to the internet the ability to
inexpensively publish or broadcast information, effectively democratizing
media. In terms of time, social media technologies allow users to immediately
publish information in near-real time.
A report
produced by the Dubai School of Government stated, “Social media tools have
merged online and offline identities, while playing an arguably critical role
in dramatic changes sweeping the Arab region,” inferred that the growth of
social media in the Middle East and the shift in usage trends have played a
critical role in mobilization, empowerment, shaping opinions, and influencing
change. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. was successfully organized
and coordinated using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It now has a
budget and has spread to cities all over the U.S. as well as other countries.
Web 2.0 technologies can be used in a variety of
government settings. Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 to describe the
cumulative changes of Web uses and applications. Web 1.0 as it existed
throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s was a prototype characterized by
passive users consuming static content with limited interactive capacity. Web
2.0 is fundamentally different as users produce and share dynamic content in
real time with the platform functioning as a communication medium with
extensive interactive capacity (DiNucci 1999; Manovich 2009). Cole (2009)
defines a new buzzword of ‘crowd sourcing’ which recognizes that useful ideas
are not confined to elected leaders or experts. Social media can allow a more
democratic society in allowing useful contributions by people at all levels of
society. Specific ministries and entities could use blogs to communicate on
public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to
internally share expertise and intelligence information (Mergel, et. al.,
2009).
Despite some experimentation by the public sector, the
use of Web technologies to enhance collaborative interaction between
government, stakeholders and citizens remains limited, (Kathleen McNutt and
Wayne Zhu, 2012). The emergence of Web 2.0, and in particular online social
media tools, has had an uneven impact across governments, ministries and
agencies. For public administrators, keeping pace with new Web technologies
will be critical to governments committed to knowledge based economies that
simultaneously foster innovation and promote social cohesion (Valtysson 2010).
For citizens, the density of online communication networks provides greater
access to information, more opportunities to engage in public debate and enhanced
capacity to undertake collective action (Woolley et al. 2010).
Second generation Web technologies have triggered
significant changes in both policy and administrative processes as governments
respond to the new behavioral, social, economic, and political norms of the
network society. As Dunleavy and his colleagues have observed, information
technologies (IT) are fundamentally reshaping public management systems,
service delivery models and state society interaction. People want new and
innovative ideas, but cooperation is distinctly lacking as governments and
companies jealously guard their secrets. Finally, The Global Village has arrived
which has acknowledged the full maturation and potential of social media. It is
efficiently used in projects broad in scope and wide in application and outside
suggestions are welcomed. Technological breakthroughs have also simplified
processes, facilitating proactive creating of linkages between and among people,
organization and government. In terms of technological capacity, the
appropriate type of social media must be matched to its most relevant category
of public policy; in other words, not all social media programming is suitable
as tools for all types of public policies. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) offer a
good taxonomy of different social media types like collaborative projects,
blog, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and
virtual social worlds etc.
5.
Opportunities and Challenges
In
countries like US, the benefit of social media use for government response
agencies has been demonstrated emphatically through various cases, such as the
Queensland disasters and the Haiti earthquake. Law enforcement agencies that
have a need to contact the public quickly and efficiently should be banking up on
social media as an effective method to disseminate crucial information for
situations such as criminal activity in an area, for evacuation instructions in
case of a fire or natural disaster, and for community outreach to promote
safety in neighborhoods. Another success story includes the Kublai initiative
in Italy, which is an online community that allows creative young citizens to
participate in economic development projects to improve their communities.
Social Media today adheres to the fundamental tenet of democracy in that it is
powered By the People and is meant For the People.
However, studies
looking at Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong, found that even in
2011, 65% of organizations including government organizations have no policy
regarding social media use by employees; almost 50% of the government
organizations do not monitor social media plans, policies, and mediums regularly. Back home, the picture is gloomy. As per
Magro 2012, Asian governments in overall seemed to avoid the use of social
media. Those few governments that did use it used it for disseminating
information, in education, and tourism, indicating that social media usage is
sparse and not interactive. It is quite obvious that governments are missing
prospects to provide better services to their citizens and reach out to the
growing number of internet users. Instead, government should focus on its
strengths and pivoting on those strengths, it would be in a better position to
engage with its stakeholders through the platform of these new technologies. Governments
should develop an overall strategic plan at all agency levels to participate in
social networks, and develop a coordinated approach to move along with all
towards an objective of efficient and quick delivery of services, improved
transparency, and buoyant people participation. This would not only bring a
radical change in governance, but also instill in people a sense of
responsibility. If people want to avail better services, they are also
accountable for the maintainability of those services. In specific circumstance
like during onset of communal riots, natural calamities, major accidents,
mishaps in industrial sectors, awareness campaigns for citizen-centric services,
societal stigmas, sensitive life-style issues etc. social media podium could be
a real gem of medium to reach out to the masses which is hailed as the most
low-cost, least time-consuming broadcast channel.
Godwin et
al. (2008) identify ten barriers and recommend potential solutions in a 2008
study of issues relevant to the US. Table 1 categorizes the ten barriers as
strategy formulation issues, policies for using non-government sites, and
issues in using government owned social networking sites.
Table 1: Barriers and solutions in SM
adoption
|
Issue Category |
Issue |
|
Strategy Formulation |
Cultural unpreparedness and lack of
strategy for using social media technologies |
|
Government Site Usage |
Prohibition of
persistent cookies as would be required for site personalization Rules
requiring control number to survey and request information from the public Providing
access for people with disabilities including transcripts / captions on
audio/video content Administrative
requirements during rulemaking on how to accept comments from public on new
regulations |
|
Non-Government Site Usage |
Blocking employee access to social
media sites Agreeing to terms of service required
by social media sites Advertising placed on pages by social
media sites Government procurement rules for
“free” service offered Privacy standards and enforcements of
social media sites |
Issues in Adoption of Social Media
Technologies in Government (Godwin et al. (2008)
2. There are typically multiple layers of policies and processes governing information flow which impairs rapid responses to public mood or individual information needs or requests. People expect responses in hours or days, not weeks, or they will seek information elsewhere.
3. Poor technical infrastructure and internet access can
impair some agencies’ ability to interact with bandwidth intensive sites, for example, SecondLife requires good processing speeds and a fast internet connection to be functional.
4. Security measures (network firewalls) and other restrictions impair professional’s ability to engage with new media and the approval process to access some sites may delay experimentation with new media.
5. The federal government’s official language mandate adds a further complexity to executing rapid and interactive conversation.
Apart from above, other key challenges
include firms’ ability of real time, regular interaction and constant
engagement with stakeholders, which is considered as a critical component of a
social media strategy. For agencies, this may require streamlining
message-approval processes or establishing guidelines to train and empower
frontline communicators to engage and interact directly with the public.
Agencies dealing with linguistic minorities will face similar challenges.
Further, social media technologies do not offer clear-cut ROI justifications
based on cost efficiencies or service delivery. And, while non-government
agencies can choose the customers they target, governments are there to serve
the common good of all citizens. Therefore, enough deliberation needs to be carried out before
adoption of social media in government.
Like any other IT
investment, social media investments need to be planned and the required
concomitant organizational change to culture, people, structure, and processes need
to be managed for effective results. Although, it is reasonable to start small
to see which initiatives work and which do not, the maneuverability of
government in adopting social media by the trial and error approach is markedly
lower than business. Therefore, a strategic planning approach as presented here
becomes necessary for effectively leveraging social technology in government.
Some believe that success with social media cannot be sustained under the
current structure of governments worldwide. They propose that sustained success
can only come when governments create new organizational units to manage newly
created e-participation channels, and also to analyze the large quantities of
both structured data (e.g., citizens’ rankings and ratings) and unstructured
data (e.g., citizens’ postings in textual form) that will be created by them.
The personnel of
these new units must have specialized skills concerning the new electronic
modes of communication, and also be immersed in a quite different culture from
the dominant ‘law enforcement’ and “regulatory culture” of government agencies.
7.
Strategies for adopting SM
In the design of expert systems, a method called
“backward-chaining” is sometimes used to model the steps needed to solve a
problem. Backward-chaining involves starting with the ultimate goal in mind,
then working backward through intermediate steps to find a solution path.
However, this strategy is not without its own questions like whether it would
be able to empower every citizen, be able to bestow the ability on every
government agency to engage in meaningful interaction, and whether it would
enjoy direct participation from every citizen and empower them to have instant
access to classified information.
Figure I: Four different foundational
positions when writing social media policies
Ref: Disciplining social media: An
analysis of social media policies in 26 Swedish municipalities, by Mathias
Klang and Jan Nolin.
Web 2.0 technologies can be used in a
variety of government settings. Governments have used social sites to reach
constituents during elections or times of crisis. With limited resources and
funding, governments need to develop a well-written strategic plan for the most
effective use in order to reach their audience.
Future studies on government usage of
social media could analyze how local or municipal governments exploit this
technology, and could explore if there is a significant difference between the
two. Local governments may have a different perspective on native issues and
services, and could easily develop their own implementation strategies for
social media. Local people can have a comprehensive understanding of issues
concerning them and can give better and quicker ideas to solve issues.
Governments should create feedback
mechanisms, and emphasize on implementation of grievance redressal strategies which
would send the message to the citizens that their views are being taken
seriously. It is imperative that the site users are active participants in data
input to the functions, which the government will implement and at the same
time be involved in constant maintenance leading to the growth in quality of
governance. Human Capital Institute (2009) suggests that information on current
usage of tools on these sites be widely disseminated to encourage citizen
leaders to opine on the efficacy of these services. Government leaders could
emphasize increased communication between various functional groups and
government entities. Galeotti and Goyal (2009) argue that social interaction in
this social networking setting is a factor that entities should consider when
setting strategies on using this media. Social interaction indicates that a
minority of the population can shape the attitudes and behaviors of the
majority of the population. Thus, governments could use social sites to reach
the key influential individuals, who may be disposed to change the opinions of
others, leading towards the conforming with government’s way of thinking. Today’s government organizations have acknowledged
the role of IT and IT governance is
indeed high on the agenda and that organizations with
a mature mix of structures, processes and relational mechanisms indeed achieve
a higher degree of business / IT alignment maturity compared to other organizations.
According to Accenture’s Public Service
Value Governance Framework (Accenture, 2010), the desired public service value
to be created and the role of social media in realizing it, must be guided by
four principles:
1. Outcome-Based Focus – Generating tangible
improvements in the social and economic conditions of citizens.
2. Balanced to Ensure Fairness – Serving the
common good by providing access for all citizens.
3. Engagement to Co-Produce Public Value –
Engage, educate, but also help
citizens improve their own quality of
life by tapping into their experience.
4. Improving Government Accountability –
Increasing transparency in reporting cost-effectiveness of initiatives and
providing citizens the opportunity to “talk back” when governments fail to
deliver expected public value.
Some of the
rational approaches which can be embraced by government organizations based on
above guidelines could be ----
1. Be
consistent. --- To
consistently feed the ubiquitous consumer by adding and distributing new
content on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis.
2. Be
useful. --- With useful
content, stakeholders like clients, consumers, companies, suppliers, traders shall
be keen to follow and trust the organization because of that content.
3. Be
authentic on content. --- Authenticity
breeds trust, and trust breeds business. If an organization can share
authentic, even vulnerable content, it will resonate with people and shall not
result in any lost client.
4. Tie into your
customer's emotions. --- if an organization can stir up core
concept of marketing and advertising to tap into what resonates emotionally
with organization’s audience, thus creating an poignant connection with
customers, the organization will be one step ahead of its competitors.
5. Be
where your audience is. ---
An organization should share right content in the right places, with the right
people to enlighten its professional objective conveyed straight across
consumers.
6. Advertise
better. --- A firm doesn’t
have to spend a lot of money on advertising to be a great content marketer. But
spending a little money to help reach the right people is sure to get it on the
proper track.
7. Tell, don't
sell. --- It’s a common trait among consumers that they don’t want to be sold to but everyone loves a good story. So
storytelling as an approach can be used to
create content that people actually
want to share.
8.
Unanswered questions
It’s
definitely not an exaggeration to say that the world hasn’t suddenly woken up
to social media. Social media has gradually permeated down to our lives
knowingly or unknowingly. Its time today’s public sector firms accept it
willingly and make it an innate part of organizational functioning. In the back
drop of the challenges faced or to be faced by public sector firms, there
remain answered questions like
1.
Whether
citizen feedback through e-government uses of social media results in
governmental change.
2. Whether
governmental entities using social media
have an agreed-upon, long-term
goal for the interaction
they seek with citizens and if there are conflicting
long term goals, or are there only short-
term objectives.
3. The use
of social media in e-government differs by social
culture and form of government. What forms
of government are most likely to seek citizen
feedback and what types of social cultures
are less likely to participate in e- government?
4. Future
research on social media in e-government is needed
in the areas of objectives and strategy, categorization
of e-government applications, and
policy-making.
Such planning will help shape future
strategy and fill the vacuum caused by the current lack of definitive goals and
objectives. Classifying social media functionality and projects according to an
accepted standard will improve the available knowledge base by standardizing
the vocabulary. This is important since governments all over the world are
currently working on similar e-government initiatives.
Finally, more
work on social media and e-government policies is still needed since the use of
these technologies is changing rapidly. Government regulations have been
traditionally slow to catch up with the information age. As the objectives and
strategies for government use of social media solidify over time, policy makers
must keep pace with the perennial flow.
9. Copyright forms
If my paper is
accepted, I must submit a declaration that my paper is original and not
submitted anywhere else.
10. Citation
and References
Journal:
1.
Magro, M.J., A Review of Social Media Use in E-Government, Administrative
sciences, ISSN 2076-3387, 2012, 2, 148-16.
2.
Boutié, P., Will this kill that? Will digital media forever
change communications?, LAMTAR Planning & Communication, ISSN: 1363-254X, Vol.
1 Iss: 3, pp.272 – 279.
3.
BEZJIAN-AVERY,
A., CALDER, B., IACOBUCCI, D., New Media Interactive Advertising vs.
Traditional Advertising, Journal of advertisement research, July l August 1998,
23-32.
4.
Bitner,
M.J., Ostrom, A.L., Morgan, F.N., Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique
for Service Innovation, University of West Florida
5.
André,
O., Next generation communications, Next generation communications, Alcatel-Lucent.
6.
Dadashzadeh,
M., Social Media In Government: From eGovernment To eGovernance, Journal of
Business & Economics Research, November, 2010 Volume 8, Number 11 81
7.
Kuzma,
J. Asian government usage of Web 2.0 social media, Eur. J. ePractice Nº 9, March
2010, ISSN: 1988-625X , 9, 69–81.
8.
LaPaze,
R.E. Friending the Government: Why US Government Social Media Websites do not
Function as Public Spheres and What Can be Done to Promote Civic Participation.
Master’s Thesis; George Mason University: Fairfax, VA, USA, 2011.
9.
Deschamps,
R., McNutt, K., Zhu, W., Environmental Scan on Social Media Use by the Public
Sector Administration, Public Engagement and Citizen Centered Services, October
21, 2012.
10. Merchant, R.M., Elmer, S., Lurie, N.,
Integrating Social Media into Emergency-Preparedness Efforts, N Engl J Med
2011; 365:289-291July 28, 2011, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1103591.
11. Kerpen, D., Likeable
Social Media, http://www.amazon.com/Likeable-Social-Media-Customers-Irresistible/dp/0071762345/ref=tmm_pap_title_0, accessed on 16/9/13.
A very illuminating article. Thanks Nibedita!
ReplyDelete