Governments and Socialising

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The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.

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Governments and Socialising

9 January 2012

The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens. Xinghui Guo finds out why APAC governments are doing this and how they manage the communication channels.

Social media can be used by governments to provide greater transparency as well as easier and more timely and convenient access to official information, says Andrea Di Maio, Vice President at Gartner, about the functions of social media in the public sector.

“It can be used to engage citizens and other stakeholders on a number of important topics, ranging from policy-making to addressing emergencies or complementing government services with voluntary resources,” Di Maio explains.

“It can be used to gather the sentiment about certain topics by performing social analytics or liaising with communities established by citizens on topics they feel strongly about.” Social media is an important platform for governments in this time and age. As Raj Munusamy, Director of Marketing, Public Services, SAP, put it: “If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated after China and India.”

Facebook now has more than 750 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes per month with an average Facebook user having 130 friends.

“Facebook is a tool capable of mobilising tens of thousands of people in a matter of days. It gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, in a way that government agencies cannot ignore,” states Munusamy.

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Government buy-in

Luckily for the public sector, governments aren’t ignoring the social platform. According to Twitter, 35 global head of states use the micro-blogging site as a primary way of communicating with their constituencies.

“In the United States,” says Twitter’s blog, “frequent Tweeters include every cabinet agency, 84 per cent of state governors, and every major candidate for President.”

In Singapore, for instance, the Prime Minister has called for the Government to do better in social media, prompting a full-fledged training program on ways to embrace and leverage social media across the Government of Singapore, shares Munusamy.

This is a calling that the Singapore Police Force (SPF) has heeded.

Aside from its extensive engagement effort that includes a YouTube channel, TV programme, a FaceBook page with 160,998 followers, and a Twitter account, SPF is launching an iPhone application this month.

“With the rapid growth of social media, especially in the last 3 to 4 years, SPF has to stay relevant to changing times in reaching out to the young and Internet-savvy audience in our fight against crime,” explains Ng Guat Ting, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Director of Public Affairs Department, SPF. “People now access social media on the go via their mobile phones. This means that the SPF must be able to reach out to the community via multiple channels, including through mobile phones.” Australian government agencies are no strangers to social media too. Parks Victoria—the Victorian statutory authority responsible for parks in the state—set up their media accounts in March this year “after a few months of careful planning”, said Jon Garner, Senior Communications Officer - Online, Parks Victoria.

The agency is now on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube, even archiving their activities to comply with public record policies.

Earlier this year when major flooding trapped campers in a park, Parks Victoria even used these media to “give immediate and accurate images of what had happened and show that the situation was under control and people safe”, shares Garner.

Strategies: A means to an end?

With multiple employees managing the social media accounts—let’s not even go into various ministries and governments yet—how can the public sector present a cohesive image throughout?

“Social media, being a free movement on the web, requires a multi-pronged approach,” says Munusamy. “On one hand there is a need for a centralised model for the government to better manage the communications process and programmes, but on the other, there is a need for a more liberal approach for agencies to be able to engage their constituents quickly and effectively.”

“Many governments are already looking into social media but few have a cohesive and effective strategy in place. This is not an easy move but it is necessary.”

Di Maio however cautions that strategies should be developed with a social media policy in place. “These policies should focus on how to prevent employees from taking unnecessary risks to themselves and to their organisations when being on social media, and should determine the relationships with other policies, such as freedom of information, public record, data protection and so forth,” he says.

However, having a social media policy or strategy does not necessarily lead to making effective use of social media, warns Di Maio.

“I’m skeptical about the need for having them. This would imply that social media is an end in itself, rather than a means. So I would welcome to see social media handled as part of a communication strategy, or as part of an IT strategy, or as part of a strategy to more effectively fight crime or re-employ unemployed people.”

For both SPF and Parks Victoria, both agencies seem to be using these tools as a means—fighting crime and public education for SPF, and inspiring people to visit parks, share experiences and collaborate on park development for Parks Victoria.

As Ng says, “SPF’s approach in social media is to tap into its full potential by exploring possibilities of these platforms to engage the public.”

“The assessment is SPF’s involvement in social media has to go beyond using social media for public communications purposes to one which could galvanise the online community into action to fight crime and generate participation in police-related activities, programmes and schemes.”

Future plans

Both SPF and Parks Victoria have interesting social media ideas up its sleeves.

Apart from the iPhone app earlier mentioned, SPF has a vision of community policing being extended to the online world and the agency is looking into hosting e-Townhalls type of dialogue sessions via SPF’s Facebook page—similar to what US president, Barack Obama, has been doing with Twitter and Facebook.

SPF is also thinking of hosting live chats with fans so that citizens and residents can freely engage with police officers online.

As for Parks Victoria, Exciting plans in its pipeline include finding ways to segment their main audience, and providing ways to enable people to select which parks to receive updates from, so that the agency can share local photos, stories, videos and events with the people that are most relevant. “So in addition to our ‘main’ presence on Facebook and Twitter, we are looking at how people can connect with and follow the individual parks that mean the most to them,” says Garner.

‘Only a channel’ According to Di Maio, social media is just a channel—a channel to listen and a channel to engage. “Social media is often considered as an additional channel to reach out to the populace. If one looks at the public affairs or the communication viewpoint, this is absolutely correct. However this is only one, and I would argue a rather marginal use of social media,” says Di Maio.

Di Maio thinks that governments should find the right blend between social media channels that they can control and social media where they just participate through individual employees’ engagement rather than the government as a whole.

“Governments should reflect better about whether it is better to own a social media presence, or join somebody else’s one, Di Maio quips.

“For instance, if a new draft policy is unwelcome by a part of the community, it is very likely that protesters will self-organise in a online community to debate this. It can be more effective for government to monitor and join such external community to respond, rather than creating its own.” “They are more likely to be able to steer people’s sentiment better than if they just stand on top of their own, institutional social media soapbox,” Di Maio ends.

Social media best practices for government

The best way to approach social media is to look at three different uses, Maio advices.

Official use — How the agency as a whole uses social media as a channel for communication and/or engagement.

Professional use — How individual employees are supposed to use social media as a tool, among others, to do their job.

Personal use — How employees should make a personal use of these tools without infringing their code of conduct.

“Interestingly enough, the boundaries between the “professional” and “personal” use is very blurred, and the best examples of valuable use of social media we have seen is where employees leverage their personal identity (as well as social connections) to solve professional problems,” says Maio. “Strategies, in fact, tend to cover the official use above, where most of the potential (in social media) is in the other two.”