Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Government Information Quarterly

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf

Government innovation through social media☆

J. Ignacio Criado a, Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan b,⁎, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia c
a
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
b
Accounting and Business Administration Department, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, Mexico
c
Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE), Mexico

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Available online 18 November 2013 Social media in government is becoming one of the major trends in Electronic Government (e-government)
research and practice worldwide. During the last few years, several authors have addressed the potential of social
Keywords: media for the innovation of public sector organizations. Most of these contributions have focused on the technical
Social media dimensions of social media, while other aspects have not attracted equal attention. In contrast, this introductory
e-Government article interrogates the role of social media in the basic areas of e-government: government information flows
Twitter
and the availability of government information; the use of information technology to create and provide
Facebook
Web 2.0
innovative government services; the impact of information technology on the relationships between the
Innovation governed and those governing; and the increasing importance of information policies and information
Digital government technologies for democratic practices. Accordingly, the next few pages propose and develop three dimensions
Government 2.0 of social media in government: tools, goals, and topics. We think that these dimensions could help to better
understand the use of social media in government settings. Then, after a brief review of current trends in social
media and government research, we present the articles included in this special issue. Finally, we present
some practical lessons and suggest ideas for future research. This special issue could be seen as a starting point
for the development of innovation through social media in public administrations around the world.
© 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction of common interests in different conferences and journals within the e-

The existence of social media tools in government is changing the
landscape of public agencies and bureaucracies around the world.
During the last years, public administrations have adopted different
Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networking,
multimedia sharing, mashup applications, tagging, virtual worlds, and
crowdsourcing, among others. After some years of experimentation,
testing, and assessment, the diffusion of social media in government is
now intended to innovate how public bureaucracies operate internally
and how they interact with the public outside government's
organizational boundaries. This article serves as the introduction to
the special issue and considers the existing potential, pitfalls,
opportunities, and/or risks derived from the implementation of social
media in government settings.
So far, emerging contributions to the study of social media in
government are guided by individual more than by collective efforts.
Although researchers are progressively developing a research agenda
☆ Government Information Quarterly Special Issue on Innovating Government through
Social Media Tools, Applications, and Strategies.
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: ignacio.criado@uam.es (J.I. Criado), rsandovala@uaemex.mx
(R. Sandoval-Almazan), joseramon.gil@cide.edu (J.R. Gil-Garcia).
government community, this agenda is by no means complete or
comprehensive. For example, the special issue coordinated by Chun
and Luna-Reyes (2012) showed three schematic representations of
how government, citizens, and data models interact through social
media (social media-based citizen engagement model; social media-
based data sharing model; and social media-based real-time col-
laborative government model). Nonetheless, it is an example of the
current ad hoc approach to the analysis of social media in government
and the need to foster a comparative, transnational, and more integrated
agenda of research in the future.
This special issue has welcomed contributions from different
perspectives and areas of research on social media in government.
In that regard, this issue has brought together international high quality
research to produce theoretical and empirical insights on aspects related
to the adoption, use, results, and impacts of social media in government
settings, with a particular emphasis on policy and management aspects,
as opposed to technical. This special issue attempts to provide an
integrated perspective on social media in government with a particular
focus on the implications of innovation in the public sector. To do so,
we have used a structure based on three dimensions: tools, goals, and
topics. Although the articles accepted for publication have underlined
those dimensions in different ways, we asked all authors to consider
them as an overall analytical framework.

0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.10.003
320 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
Theoretically, Mergel (2012a) is probably the leading contribution to
the comprehensive study of social media in public administration so far.
Her work is based on the analysis of social media technologies and their
application in U.S. government agencies, mostly since the inception of
Obama's presidency in 2008. She has pointed out the preliminary
consequences of social media application in public agencies, and how
these agencies are using social media to promote transparency, partici-
pation, and collaboration. Finally, the conclusions of her work illuminate
that the biggest challenge is not this new generation of social tech-
nologies themselves, but the adaptation of them to the given political
and administrative situations and government institutional settings.
Accordingly, like other previous technologies (Fountain, 2001; Gil-
García, 2012a), social media tools face problems of adaptation to the
existing organizational culture and institutional structure of public
sector organizations. This argument is an important starting point for
our approach to social media in public agencies.
The article is organized in five sections, including this foregoing
introduction. The second section defines social media tools in the public
sector, giving an idea of previous descriptions and how they can be
useful to understand the potentials of social media in government. The
third section outlines the state of the art of social media in government,
considering the dimensions of interest for this special issue: tools, goals,
and topics. Then, we present and briefly describe the articles in
this special issue. Finally, the concluding section raises ideas about the
future innovations of government using social media, and the re-
search agenda connected to the study of this phenomenon in public
administration.
2. Defining social media in the public sector
At this point, there is not a comprehensive definition of social media
in government. In short, social media can be defined as a group of
technologies that allow public agencies to foster engagement with
citizens and other organizations using the philosophy of Web 2.0. All
the existing approaches have pinpointed the social dimension of Web
2.0 technologies that “refer to a collection of social media through
which individuals are active participants in creating, organizing, editing,
combining, sharing, commenting, and rating Web content as well as
forming a social network through interacting and linking to each
other” (Chun, Shulman, Sandoval, & Hovy, 2010: 2). Here, the terms
collaborative, traceable, searchable, linkable, and open can be un-
derstood as core features of the utilization of social media tools in public
administration.
McAfee's (2006) perspective gauges the capabilities of social media
in complex organizations. The SLATES capabilities (search, link,
authoring, tags, extensions, and signal) are directly derived from the
implementation of social media in organizations. Chun and Luna-
Reyes (2012) suggest that these technologies enable government's
ability to achieve productivity through search capabilities for employees
to effectively locate resources and knowledge; linking employees and
customers together to develop social networks; allowing employees
and customers to co-create and share content 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. Chun et al. (2010) and
Chun and Luna-Reyes (2012) call this set of capabilities social media
enterprises 2.0 or social enterprises. Therefore, social media tech-
nologies can be understood as platforms to interact with citizens and
organizations with innovative potentialities.
At first sight, the public sector could benefit from the capabilities of
social media technologies due to the high amount of data resources
available from the interaction with citizens, businesses, and other public
administrations. In this line of argument, studies from Mergel (2012b),
Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes (2010), and Bertot, Jaeger, and Hansen
(2012), among others, suggest the capacity of social media in government
to foster co-production of services and public policies, crowdsourcing of
solutions to social and political problems, and political and democratic
engagement in a growing dialog about political issues. Consequently,
the diffusion of social media in government involves critical aspects for
the future of public administration.
3. Understanding current research on social media in government:
A proposal with three dimensions
There are certainly many ways to classify and understand current
research on social media in government. Here, we propose that using
three different, interrelated dimensions allows for a better under-
standing of previous studies about social media in government. Some
dimensions profile the emerging research on social media within the e-
government community, which began around 2008. There exists a
general focus on some specific social media tools and applications,
i.e., Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. The goals or objectives derived
from the use of social media in the public sector have been broadly
oriented, such as participation, collaboration, and transparency, but also
openness, good governance, or cost savings. Finally, the topics of interest
to social media in government are diverse, including different supporting
theories, methodologies, policy domains, levels of government, and
countries of reference. At the same time, each of these topics echoes
some trends of interest.
3.1. Tools
The first dimension refers to the social media instruments and
applications that public administrations explicitly use. The expected
social media applications in government may differ in type and nature,
including, but not limited to, social networking (e.g., Facebook), micro-
blogging (e.g., Twitter), multimedia sharing (e.g., YouTube), virtual
worlds (e.g., Second Life), mashups and open data (e.g., Data.gov),
questioning tools (e.g., Quora), crowdsourcing (e.g., Mechanical Turk),
collaboration tools (e.g., Peer-to-Patent and Wiki Government), tagging
(e.g., Digg), and content syndication (e.g., RSS). This first dimension
indicates not only the type of social technologies actually in operation
in public agencies, but also which of them have been analyzed in the
literature with more intensity.
A widely shared assumption among researchers is that the most
used social media tools in public administrations are those with more
utilization in society. Therefore, it is believed that Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, blogs, Flickr, and LinkedIn are the most widespread social
media technologies in bureaucracies. A quantitative study from
Bonsón, Torres, Royo, and Flores (2012) confirms this conclusion at
the local level of government in the European Union; Snead (2013),
Bridges, Appel, and Grossklags (2012), Kavanaugh et al. (2012),
Landsbergen (2010), and Mahler and Regan (2011) confirm it in the
U.S.; and Sandoval-Almazan, Gil-Garcia, Luna-Reyes, Luna-Reyes, and
Diaz-Murillo (2011) have also found it to be true in the Mexican states.
At the same time, this group of technologies is also invoked when
addressing the capacities of social media to innovate relationships
with the public, to some extent as a result of their level of diffusion
and high popularity among public administrations. However, they are
not the only social tools and applications the e-government community
studies.
In fact, authors have portrayed the use of other types of social media
tools. Examples include a Danish online health forum www.sundhed.dk
(Andersen, Medaglia, & Henriksen, 2012), the COPSS communities of
public service support (Meijer, Grimmelikhuijsen, & Brandsma, 2011),
the online forum antheroisi (Stylios et al., 2010), the COCKPIT toolkit
(Kokkinakos et al., 2012), the OCOPOMO project (Wimmer, Scherer,
Moss, & Bicking, 2012), or the +Spaces virtual spaces (Kardara et al.,
2012). In all these cases, social media tools in government have a
different approach than those developed in the private sector because
they develop a specific approach to a given situation, or the application
solves certain social problems. Therefore, these social networks have an
 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
ad hoc approach and expand the potential of traditional or more
widespread social media tools in order to foster innovations, primarily
for the interaction process with citizens.
3.2. Goals
The second dimension denotes the existence of some goals or ends
derived from the use of social media. Overall, this dimension assumes
the importance of the social, policy, and managerial objectives that are
expected to directly or indirectly arise from the use of social media in
public agencies. In other words, objectives for the implementation of
these technologies emphasize their political, social, and managerial
dimensions over their technical side. For instance, President Obama's
2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government stated
three goals (transparency, participation, and collaboration), which the
executive branch of the U.S. government was tasked with fostering via
open government strategies (Lee & Kwak, 2012). Likewise, recent policy
strategies and user guides for social media encourage governments to
define the achievements they hope to accomplish with the deployment
of social media, including categories such as openness, transparency,
citizen participation, policy effectiveness, managerial efficiency, cost
savings, good governance, and public employee and citizen satisfaction
(Bailey & Singleton, 2010; Criado & Rojas-Martín, 2013; Hrdinová,
Helbig, & Peters, 2010). Bertot et al. (2012) suggest three policy
objectives for federal agency use of social media: (a) access and social
inclusion; (b) privacy, security, and archiving; and (c) governing
and governance. Thus, the variety of objectives and goals is potentially
high, as recent research on social media in government clearly
highlights.
In some case studies, the objectives of social media in government
are more clearly described and directly distinguishable. Overall, the
descriptions of social media use with a focus on citizen engagement
pinpoint participation, openness, transparency, good governance, and
trust as priorities of the implementation process (Charalabidis &
Loukis, 2012; Maisonneuve, Stevens, & Ochab, 2010; Meijer et al.,
2011; Panagiotopoulos, Sams, Elliman, & Fitzgerald, 2011; Sobkowicz,
Kaschesky, & Bouchard, 2012). This perspective is shared in some
studies about the opinions of public managers and employees directly
involved in social media development within their own organizations
(Kavanaugh et al., 2012; Landsbergen, 2010; Picazo-Vela, Gutierrez-
Martinez, & Luna-Reyes, 2012) or reviews of social media policy
documents (Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes, 2012). Similar to previous
academic studies, public managers also emphasize aspects such as
participation, transparency, or openness, as the main objectives of social
media use in government.
Nonetheless, the goals resulting from the use of social media in
government are not always well defined and, in some cases, are not
easily identifiable from their implementation and the presentation of
case studies. For instance, the work of Meijer and Thaens (2010) has
suggested a gap between broad visions of Government 2.0 and social
media use in the public sector and the specific needs and demands of
government organizations. In a study from Andersen et al. (2012) the
goals of social media are very extensive, including cost savings,
managerial efficiency, or public employee performance and satisfaction.
However, these cases are the exception, not the rule. In sum, the goals
linked to social media applications in government are more oriented
to the innovation of the external layer of interaction with citizens than
the internal area of managerial functions.
3.3. Topics
The third dimension conveys the existence of different aspects of
social media in government for knowledge building. The topics directly
refer to the main features of the leading publications within this
emerging field of knowledge: theories framing the usage of social
media in government; methods applied to its investigation; policy
321
domains of implementation; levels of government; and the country or
region of reference. First, social media in government opens up a
cutting-edge field of research and it is essential to identify the theories
and discourses that can be applied to improve the analysis and
understanding of this phenomenon. In short, the most recent literature
on social media in government has predominantly relied on Web 2.0 or
Government 2.0 concepts (Anttiroiko, 2010; Bonsón et al., 2012; Criado
et al., 2011; Sandoval-Almazan et al., 2011). In addition, social media is
very close to research on open government and transparency (Bertot
et al., 2010; Harrison et al., 2012; Lee & Kwak, 2012; Luna-Reyes &
Chun, 2012; Whitmore, 2012), citizen participation (Linders,
2012; Nam, 2012), interagency collaboration (Gil-García, 2012b),
or even cloud computing (Jaeger, Lin, & Grimes, 2008).
At the same time, some authors have investigated social media tools
as a new wave of technological innovation in the public sector that may
be studied using traditional e-government theories. Social media have
been analyzed using the following theoretical frameworks, to name a
few: impact of information technology in the public sector (Danziger &
Andersen, 2002), socio-technical and structuration theories (Orlikowski,
2000), strategic business alignment (Mintzberg, 1983), or technology
and innovation (Lazer, Mergel, Ziniel, Esterling, & Neblo, 2011).
Therefore, the study of social media in government can be oriented
through established theories as appropriate lenses to deal with this
new wave of technological innovation in the public sector (Mergel,
2012b). In other words, administrative innovation through social
media technologies may combine the same type of expectations of
advantages for government, but also could potentially challenge
the standard operating procedures more than other previous waves of
technological innovations.
Furthermore, current studies about social media in government have
applied diverse methods of research, policy domains of implementation,
levels of government, and country/region of reference. In the first case,
researchers have generally applied quantitative, qualitative, and mixed
method approaches, but the study of social media in government may
demand specific methodological approaches that differ from those
used in previous studies of e-government. In particular, there is a
growing strand of research oriented toward the development of specific
tools for analyzing social media data or big social data (Chun & Luna-
Reyes, 2012). The opportunities to enhance data visualization, study
unstructured data, or develop sentiment/opinion analysis spring from
the massive amounts of data social technologies produce—as well as
the growing capacity for their storage, integration, and analysis by both
governments and scholars.
In sum, the study of social media in government is actually in its
infancy. At the same time, the number of scholarly publications in this
field is growing exponentially since its inception a few years ago. With
this growth in mind, our attention to the three dimensions (tools,
goals, and topics) has facilitated an overview of this area of research
and presented some of its emerging trends. In addition, this approach
may help to understand the work of the authors who were attracted
to the analysis and implications of social media in government.
4. Innovation, government and social media: Articles in the
special issue
This special issue is intended to move forward the research on social
media in government and presents up-to-date studies from leading
academics around the world. This group of papers illustrates the
relatively rapid implementation of social media technologies in public
agencies, as well as the high expectations they are creating in different
social and administrative contexts. This special issue publishes articles
that provide diversity to the three dimensions (topics, tools, and
goals) under study. We hope this effort may contribute to better
understanding this emerging area of research in a more systematic
and integrative manner. The next paragraphs present the articles of
the special issue.
322 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
Mergel offers a framework for interpreting social media interactions
in the public sector given the lack of measurement practices thus far.
Using data from interviews with social media directors in the executive
branch of the U.S. government, the author provides insights about com-
pliance with the Open Government Initiative to increase transparency,
participation and collaboration. This article compares previous efforts
to measure the impact of e-government with the current ways to assess
the effects of social technologies in public administration. Mergel then
presents a framework for measuring social media interactions in the
public sector. This framework is based on transparency, participation,
and collaboration; each of these missions including goals, tactics, social
media mechanisms, and outcomes. Finally, the author reflects on how
social media technologies may help public sector professionals. She
includes ideas about the technology's alignment with the strategy of
public agencies, the type of stakeholders involved in the process of
distribution and communication through social media channels, and
the real-time information sharing and responsiveness challenge in
government. Consequently, this article provides an interesting ap-
proach to move government forward from the current situation in
which third-party service providers offer most of the measurement
techniques and government measurement dashboards are not yet
well developed.
Bekkers, Edwards, and De Kool present an article about the
implications of monitoring individuals via social media. The practices
of web monitoring and surveillance are growing in importance with
the use of social technologies, opening a normative discussion with
regard to transparency, accountability, and privacy. Theoretically, the
authors distinguish three approaches to social media monitoring and
organizational practices: rational–instrumental, political–strategic, and
communicative. Empirically, the article tackles this issue through the
study of four Dutch public organizations; two cases concern social
media monitoring in the context of policy-making, while the other
two cases focus on social media monitoring in the context of policy
implementation and service delivery. After a careful study in each
organization of the process of monitoring (goals, operating procedures,
surveillance, usage, and effects), the authors deliver a set of interesting
conclusions. First, the three theoretical approaches enable the general-
ization of typical practices in public agencies' use of social media
monitoring in policy-making and external communication. Second, this
study raises ethical questions and several aspects of social media
monitoring that have to be considered in this context, including perceived
privacy, the method of monitoring, and the covert nature of monitoring.
In sum, this article investigates one of the emerging topics in social
media studies and one with high implications for the future evolution of
these technologies in government.
Meijer and Thaens offer a study about the different strategies, uses,
and results of the same type of social media technology in different public
sector organizations. This article tackles with this research problem by
analyzing the social media strategies of three police departments in
North America (Toronto, Boston, and Washington, DC). The authors
identify three potential strategies (following Mergel & Bretschneider's
typology (2013)): push, pull, and networking. After a careful study of
the three police departments, the study concludes that a combination
of contextual and path-dependency factors accounts for differences in
the emerging social media strategies of the three police departments.
This article suggests that social media technologies, like other previous
waves of technology innovation, have their own transformational
potential; however, organizational and contextual factors are also
essential to understand their results in public bureaucracies.
Mossberger develops an investigation about the adoption and uses
of social networks and other interactive tools in the local governments
of large American cities. The assumption of this article is that social
media tools have the potential to improve interactions with citizens
through dialog. The study reviews the use of the most important social
media tools in seventy-five major cities of the United States between
2009 and 2011. Likewise, the article develops three in-depth case
studies (the cities of Seattle, Chicago, and Louisville), with the intention
to analyze the social media strategies in three departments: the mayor's
office, police department, and parks department. In all the cases, the
author distinguishes the strategy for each of the social media studied
(Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Blog). Using Mergel's typology
of social media strategies (push, pull, and networking), the author finds
out that push strategies predominate, although there are some signs of
greater openness toward dialog with citizens, primarily on Twitter and
taking place in either the parks department or the mayor's office. In
conclusion, this article gives evidence about the current status of social
technology implementation in local governments, while at the same
time stimulating questions about their potential for improvement of
participation and discussion.
Ferro, Loukis, Charalabidis, and Osella's article provides insights on
the relationship between social media technologies and the policy-
making process. On a practical level, this article assesses the potential
and the challenges of a centralized, cross-platform approach to social
media for government agencies engaged in policy making. Theoretically,
it develops a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation
of advanced practices of social media in public policy-making using
different perspectives (technological, political, and organizational). The
authors develop this double approach using a telemedicine case study
from the Piedmont Regional Government in Italy. The government
used social media tools to collect feedback from the users (e.g. patients,
families, doctors) of the telemedicine program in the whole region,
including an online survey with questions about acceptance of the
program and the willingness to co-finance its implementation (e.g., cover
the personal costs of devices' rental, internet connection). Then this
article provides evidence from different data sources about the
potential use of social media to improve the policy-making process as
a result of technological, political, and organizational innovations. At
the same time, the authors suggest the orientation to social media
from a socio-technical point of view (avoiding technological and social
determinism). Finally, the article underlines the potential of using social
media to attract different citizen groups, having high levels of auto-
mation for content posts and retrieval, and also advanced processing
capabilities.
Zheng's article assesses the experience of Chinese government
agencies with microblogging tools. Particularly, the author studies the
drivers and challenges behind the use of microblogging, giving attention
to external factors and internal capabilities of Chinese government
agencies that use social technologies. In particular, this article presents
a study of Weibo, the Chinese microblogging standard (government
agencies managed over 176,000 accounts by the end of 2012). The
study used focus groups that included civil servants from various
Shanghai municipal government agencies and county governments
and personal interviews with the managers of twelve influential
government microblogging accounts in Shanghai. Hence, this article
identifies a group of external drivers and challenges to social media use
and a group of internal capabilities, categorized along five dimensions:
social and economic; political, legal, and policy; organizational and
management; information; and technological. Although the author
shows some singularities of China from Western countries, including
the centralized review process and international influence, he also
highlights the similarities of this case with those from other countries.
Therefore, one may assume that social media implementation in
different contexts seems to share some of the same types of motivations
and challenges.
Chatfield, Scholl, and Brajawidagda present an article about the use
of social media to mitigate natural disasters with early warning systems.
Theoretically, this article is based on social network analysis and uses
the case study of the April 11th, 2011 earthquake in Indonesia to
examine the government use of the Twitter Tsunami Early Warning
Civic Network and the citizen's responsibility in the co-production and
spread of information. In particular, the authors highlight the role of
citizens to understand the speed and reach of governmental warnings.
 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
Thus, the empirical findings provide insights on the speed and reach of
the Twitter Tsunami Early Warning Civic Network and the role of
followers with the most social influence within the network and net-
savvy citizens. In fact, one of the most relevant conclusions of this
study is the growing importance of knowledge co-production in the
creation of public services and how governments can use Twitter to
engage with citizens. Lastly, the article recommends that governments
need to effectively harness social media technologies and tools, but
they also need to have effective citizen engagement policies and
strategies.
Hofmann, Beverungen, Räckers, and Becker developed an empirical
research project focused on the use of social networking sites in the
local level of government in Germany. This work is based on the
properties of social media that could improve government commu-
nication with the public, including up-to-date provision of information,
marketing, co-design, transactions, and using multimedia features.
Hence, the article presents data about the Facebook use of the twenty-
five largest German local governments. In particular, this article uses
content and sentiment analysis of thousands of posts and comments
in government Facebook sites and traces the presence of the above-
mentioned five properties of social media (up-to-date provision of
information, marketing, co-design, transactions, and using multi-
media features) and sentiments about them. This work concludes
with the identification of basic features in the Facebook pages of the
local governments, which mostly contained up-to-date provision of
information. Likewise, the authors show the most cited topics within
the posts and comments, identifying rudimentary patterns of commu-
nication with the public instead of more complex forms of collaboration
or participation. In conclusion, this article offers a taste of how local
governments use the most popular social network, giving an idea of
the future developments necessary to achieve all the potential of this
technology in public agencies.
De Oliveira and Welch present a study focused on the perceptions of
American city council managers about the use of social media in their
organizations. This article pays attention to the public outcomes of
social technologies in government, assuming that different managers
may not share the same understanding about how and why specific
tools are being used for specific purposes. The authors use a national
survey administered electronically to five different types of positions
in the cities studied: city manager/administrator, director of community
and/or economic development, director of finance, director of parks and
recreation, and deputy police chief. The article's findings show the
existence of perceptions about different uses of social media depending
on the type of tool and the organization's characteristics. Regression
analysis shows that organizational factors (work characteristics,
innovativeness, technology and management capacity, and stakeholder
influence) predict each of the four technology-task couplings the
authors identify in this study: social media for dissemination, social
media for feedback on service quality, social media for participation,
and social media for internal work collaboration. In conclusion, this
study reflects the complexity of social media technologies as a group,
and urges future research that can address not only this reality, but
also the complex interactions among social media tools and applications
with organizational and managerial features.
Abdelsalam, Reddick, Gamal, and Al-shaar develop a paper about the
presence, use, and effectiveness of social media on Egyptian govern-
ment websites. In order to understand the added value of social
technologies in developing and transitional countries, this article uses
the New Public Service theory, which views citizens as the key drivers
of policy change. The empirical work is based on the study of the
presence of social media applications on government websites and a
content analysis of Facebook (the most common social media tool
used by government entities in Egypt), including an index of page
effectiveness, post types, post actions, or comments. This paper
demonstrates the emerging use of social media among Egyptian
authorities. Egypt has observed a dramatic increase in posts and
323
comments after the spring revolution of 2011, but the role of social
media in its government is focused on the publication of unidirectional
information, with less attention to bidirectional or transactional
practices. The authors suggest that citizen participation and co-
production of services are not at the forefront of social media diffusion
in Egyptian governments; on the contrary, this case shows the tendency
to adopt technologies that preserve the existing institutional arrange-
ments in the organizations. As a consequence, the actual use of social
media reinforces the New Public Management model rather than the
New Public Service one.
The work of Sobaci and Karkin studies how city mayors in Turkey
use Twitter to deliver better public services. This article advances the
idea of Twitter as a tool for improving the implementation of a new
generation of local public services based on transparency, participation,
and citizen-oriented features. The empirical analysis shows that mayors
in Turkey have begun to use this social media tool to share information,
send personal messages and share their location, political activities, and
personal messages. Thus, while self-promotion and political marketing
seem to be the rule, transparent, participative, and citizen-oriented
provision of public services is the exception. Therefore, the authors of
this study highlight the relative impact of social technologies to deliver
innovative public services from political representatives.
5. Future research directions
This final section develops ideas about future research on social
media in government and their capabilities to foster public sector
innovation. This final section synthesizes the main findings from a
review of recent articles about social media in order to suggest future
research directions. At the same time, these recommendations
encompass some practical advice that government managers may
take into account in order to deliver the potential benefits from the
implementation of social media in public bureaucracies. Obviously,
this set of future research directions and practical recommendations is
open and will probably be challenged by future progress in this area
of study that is flourishing all over the world.
5.1. Social media innovations and institutional/organizational change
The future of social media in government seems to reflect the same
story of previous technologies and the problems they faced in delivering
institutional change in traditional public agencies. All the cases selected
for this special issue and the growing experience with social media in
government reflect the challenge of innovating traditional forms of
public organization using this new generation of information tech-
nologies. As Mergel (2012b: 283) suggests, “The innovation dilemma is
not unique to the adoption of social media use, but in comparison to
previous waves of (mostly internal) ICT adoption practices social media
online interactions are for the first time publicly observable. Every misstep
or unresponsiveness is immediately called out by the public and replicated
through each social network site”. Then, it is now more difficult than ever
before to maintain the parallel structure of traditional organizations
working with old-fashioned practices and digital structures to deliver
public service innovation while protecting organizational inertia. Thus,
the attention to institutional change and how it is produced through
public organizations will be critical for future studies of social media
and government. Theoretical frameworks based on institutional theory,
dynamic simulation, socio-technical approaches, and structuration
theory, among others, may help to fill this gap.
5.2. Measuring social media effects in government
The study of social media in government should attend to the real
impact and actual effects of this group of information technologies. In
the articles of this special issue, and other emergent contributions to
this strand of research, scholars around the world have addressed the
324 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
need to appraise the progress of social media in government. This
preoccupation is expected to grow in the next phase of social media
implementation in government, including the idea of measuring real-
time effects of social media as a source of innovation in public agencies.
To date, the perceived impacts of this technology may derive from the
openness of public bureaucracies to the public, collaboration with
other agencies in the policy process, citizens' participation in political
decisions, the maximization of resources for the operations performed,
and faster and more user friendly dissemination of information,
among others aspects. Nonetheless, the challenge is not only making
clearer the potential innovations of social media in government, but
also providing evidence from real cases, with explicit and well-defined
measurements of distributed payoffs (in economic, legal, social, and
political terms, among others) and with the capacity for replication in
different administrative contexts. This need for a future trend toward
better measurement of social media impacts in the public sector is not
only a responsibility of scholars, but also an obligation of policy
entrepreneurs who are dealing with the promotion of this area in
their organizations.
5.3. Research techniques and metrics tools
In addition to the previous research direction, the future potential of
social media as a research field is derived from the development of new
metrics and research methods. One of the most important tasks of the
research community on social media in government is determining
how to adopt and foster innovative techniques and research method-
ologies in order to comprehend this phenomenon and maximize the
potential payoffs of this group of technologies in government, as
they did with previous technological waves (Gil-García, 2012a). For
example, the adoption of innovative visualization techniques and
renovated social network analyses are creating expectations about the
future opportunities to tackle social media innovation in government
as a source of knowledge. These innovative research techniques seem
to be closely connected with the extraordinary amount of data at the
disposal of external observers approaching social media in government.
At the same time, researchers should focus not only on how new
capabilities are developed for academic purposes, but also for practical
and social purposes by providing useful ideas for governments and
the public.
5.4. The demand-side of social media
Another area of interest will be the categorization of social media
users, their motivations to interact with public agencies, and how this
interaction can facilitate better public services or policy decisions. At
this stage, the analysis of social media users is in its infancy, as the
cases selected for this special issue have confirmed. There is no reliable
information about this growing group of thousands, hundred of
thousands, or millions of citizens and organizations interacting with
public agencies using social media tools and applications. The future of
this area of research needs to face this lack of knowledge about the
demand for social media in government. Since the study of social
demand emerged as one the core areas of e-government research in
the past (Ferro, Helbig, & Gil-Garcia, 2011; Reddick & Turner, 2012),
the analysis of the demand-side of social media in government needs
to be developed in order to understand the implementation and
potential of this new generation of information technologies. Con-
sequently, it is important to define not only the segments of users or
their individual features (network amplitude, country/region of origin,
etc.), but also how to delineate the network profile surrounding a
specific government agency or area of public policy. Additionally, one
may think about how governments will use this information to target
public services or to develop new applications of social media tech-
nologies in government. In sum, the future of social media research
needs to develop this area of great importance for the promotion and
better use of social media.
5.5. Citizen engagement, participation, and co-production
Democracies around the world face challenges related to citizens'
engagement with political institutions, and social media technologies
are a potential way to change this growing negative trend. A number
of studies have highlighted the communicative capabilities of social
media tools. At the same time, the analysis of social media in
government may focus on the potential of this generation of tech-
nologies to foster participation, co-production of services, and citizens'
general engagement with public authorities. The continuous develop-
ment of micro-experiences devoted to promote participation in specific
jurisdictions or policy arenas should be accompanied by attention to
more general efforts to deliver democratic innovations using social
media in government. Here, concepts such as open innovation,
collaborative innovation, or social innovation are providing the labels
for the study of experiences in which governments and citizens work
together. At the same time, the experiences of citizens' self-organizing
for solutions to social problems using social media, in a wiki-
government fashion, may fundamentally alter the centrality of govern-
ments in the policy-making process. Consequently, the research for the
previous dimensions should focus on the implications for democracy,
citizen engagement, and legitimacy of governments. The interaction of
social media in these types of processes is emergent; however, it
deserves attention and efforts to understand the realities and myths
behind these types of political and technological processes.
5.6. Social media, open government and big data: Smart government
Social technologies cannot be isolated from other phenomena
surrounding contemporary technological developments in public
administration. In fact, there exists an intimate association between
the innovations coming from open government initiatives and big
data projects, among others. Consequently, one of the trends in the
future for social media is the integration of this movement into
something more general that could be defined as smart government
or smart state (Gil-Garcia, 2012b). This approach to public sector
innovation emphasizes inter-agency collaboration and information
integration that “could potentially happen in settings that include various
levels of government, organizations from the three branches of government,
not-for-profit organizations and private firms” (Gil-Garcia, 2012a: 273).
Hence, integration, collaboration, and cooperation, coupled with the
integration of data, information, and knowledge from different sources
and organizations, could become a core area of the studies on social
media in government in coming years. This holistic approach to
technological innovation will likely be associated with a smart state
focus in the public sector, superseding isolated approaches to tech-
nological innovation.
5.7. Social media limitations and challenges
Last, but not least, attention to social media problems and risks will
shape another future area of research. At this point, one may recognize
different challenges and threats emerging from the use of social media
in government. Some of them have been studied, including govern-
mental control of social media content, the lack of a regulatory
framework for activities related to social media, the guarantee of
individuals' privacy, and the lack of communication among different
levels of government, among other dimensions. The future study of
social media innovation in government should address these kinds of
issues—and others that we cannot even imagine at this point. The lack
of conclusive answers to these limitations and challenges is not the
exception, but the rule. This absence of knowledge is with a
consequence of the novelty of this research area and the relatively
 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
recent implementation of social technologies in government, where
some of the risks and problems associated with its implementation
are just beginning.
Thus, we perceive this moment as the starting point of a fruitful time
for innovation in government using social media, as well as for research
on the implications of these technological tools, applications, strategies,
and policies in the public sector. This article, in conjunction with the rest
of this special issue, is oriented to nurture the conversation that is taking
place all over the world. Hence, we hope this collective work could be of
interest to academics, but also to practitioners from different countries
and areas of interest. In fact, most of the aspects that we have developed
in this section are also relevant for practical purposes and delimitate
some of the issues to address in strategies and policies oriented to foster
social media in government in the near future.
References
Andersen, K. N., Medaglia, R., & Henriksen, H. Z. (2012). Social media in public health
care: Impact domain propositions. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4),
462–469.
Anttiroiko, A. -V. (2010). Innovation in democratic e-governance: Benefitting from Web
2.0 applications in the public sector. International Journal of Electronic Government
Research, 6(2), 18–36.
Bailey, C., & Singleton, R. (2010). National survey of social media use in state government.
Lexington: NASCIO.
Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Grimes, J. M. (2010). Using ICTs to create a culture of
transparency: e-Government and social media as openness and anti-corruption
tools for societies. Government Information Quarterly, 27(3), 264–271.
Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Grimes, J. M. (2012). Promoting transparency and
accountability through ICTs, social media, and collaborative e-government.
Transforming Government People Process and Policy, 6(1), 78–91.
Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Hansen, D. (2012). The impact of polices on government social
media usage: Issues, challenges, and recommendations. Government Information
Quarterly, 29(1), 30–40.
Bonsón, E., Torres, L., Royo, S., & Flores, F. (2012). Local e-government 2.0: Social media
and corporate transparency in municipalities. Government Information Quarterly, 29,
123–132.
Bridges, F., Appel, L., & Grossklags, J. (2012). Young adults and online political
participation: Search strategies and the role of social media. Information Polity, 17,
163–176.
Charalabidis, Y., & Loukis, E. (2012). Participative public policy making through multiple
social media platforms utilization. International Journal of Electronic Government
Research, 8(3), 78–97.
Chun, S. A., & Luna-Reyes, L. (2012). Social media in government. Government Information
Quarterly, 29(4), 441–445.
Chun, S. A., Shulman, S., Sandoval, R., & Hovy, E. (2010). Government 2.0. Making
connections between citizens, data and government. Information Polity: The
International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 15, 1–9.
Criado, J. I., Martín, Y., & Camacho, D. (2011). Experiences using social networks in
Spanish public administration. Paper presented at the meeting of the 1st International
Workshop on Social Data Mining for Human Behaviour Analysis. Songndal, Norway.
Criado, J. I., & Rojas-Martín, F. (2013). Social media and public administration in Spain. A
comparative analysis of the regional level of government. In R. Gil-García (Ed.),
e-Government success factors and measures: Concepts, theories, experiences, and
practical recommendations (pp. 276–298). Hershey: IGI Global.
Danziger, J. N., & Andersen, K. V. (2002). The impacts of information technology on public
administration: An analysis of empirical research from the “golden age” of
transformation. International Journal of Public Administration, 25(5), 591–627.
Ferro, E., Helbig, N. C., & Gil-Garcia, J. R. (2011). The role of IT literacy in defining digital
divide policy needs. Government Information Quarterly, 28(1), 3–10.
Fountain, J. E. (2001). Building the virtual state. Washington, D.C.: Brooking Institution
Press.
Gil-García, J. R. (2012a). Enacting electronic government success: An integrative study of
government-wide websites, organizational capabilities, and institutions. New York:
Springer.
Gil-García, J. R. (2012b). Towards a smart state? Inter-agency collaboration, information
integration, and beyond. Information Polity, 17, 269–280.
Harrison, T. M., Guerrero, S., Burke, G. B., Cook, M., Cresswell, A., Helbig, N., et al. (2012).
Open government and e-government: Democratic challenges from a public value
perspective. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy
in the Information Age, 17(2), 83–97.
Hrdinová, J., Helbig, N., & Peters, C. S. (2010). Designing social media policy for government:
Eight essential elements. Albany: The Research Foundation of State University of New
York (Retrieved February 20, 2012, from http://www.ctg.albany.edu/publications)
Jaeger, P. T., Lin, J., & Grimes, J. M. (2008). Cloud computing and information policy:
Computing in a policy cloud? Journal of Information Technology Politics, 5(3),
269–283.
Kardara, M., Fuchs, O., Kosta, E., Aisopos, F., Spais, I., & Varvarigou, T. (2012). Policy testing
in virtual environments: Addressing technical and legal challenges. International
Journal of Electronic Government Research, 8(3), 1–21.
325
Kavanaugh, A., Fox, E. A., Sheetz, S. D., Yang, S., Li, L. T., Whalen, T., et al. (2012). Social
media use by government from the routine to the critical. Government Information
Quarterly, 29(4), 480–491.
Kokkinakos, P., Koussouris, S., Panopoulos, D., Askounis, D., Ramfos, A., Georgousopoulos,
Ch., et al. (2012). Citizens collaboration and co-creation in public service delivery:
The COCKPIT project. International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 8(3),
44–62.
Landsbergen, D. (2010). Government as part of the revolution: Using social media to
achieve public goals. Electronic Journal of Electronic Government, 8(2), 134–146.
Lazer, D., Mergel, I., Ziniel, C., Esterling, K. M., & Neblo, M.A. (2011). The multiple
institutional logics of innovation. International Public Management Journal, 14(3),
311–340.
Lee, G., & Kwak, Y. H. (2012). An open government maturity model for social media-based
public engagement. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 492–503.
Linders, D. (2012). From e-government to we-government: Defining a typology for
citizen coproduction in the age of social media. Government Information Quarterly,
29(4), 446–454.
Luna-Reyes, L. F., & Chun, S. A. (2012). Open government and public participation: Issues
and challenges in creating public value. Information Polity: The International Journal of
Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 17(2), 77–81.
Mahler, J., & Regan, P.M. (2011). Federal agency blogs: Agency mission, audience, and
blog forms. Journal of Information Technology Politics, 8(2), 163–176.
Maisonneuve, N., Stevens, M., & Ochab, B. (2010). Participatory noise pollution
monitoring using mobile phones. Information Polity, 15(1–2), 51–71.
McAfee, A. P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. MIT Sloan
Management Review, 47(3), 21–28.
Meijer, A., Grimmelikhuijsen, S., & Brandsma, G. J. (2011). Communities of public service
support: Citizens engage in social learning in peer-to-peer networks. Government
Information Quarterly, 29(1), 21–29.
Meijer, A., & Thaens, M. (2010). Alignment 2.0: Strategic use of new internet technologies
in government. Government Information Quarterly, 27(2), 113–121.
Mergel, I. (2012a). Social media in the public sector: A guide to participation, collaboration,
and transparency in the networked world. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
Mergel, I. (2012b). The social media innovation challenge in the public sector. Information
Polity, 17, 281–292.
Mergel, I., & Bretschneider, S. (2013). A Three-Stage Adoption Process for Social Media
Use in Government. Public Administration Review, 73(3), 390–400.
Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in fives: Designing effective organizations. New Jersey:
Prentice Hall.
Nam, T. (2012). Citizens' attitudes toward open government and government 2.0.
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 78(2), 346–368.
Orlikowski, W. J. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: A practice
lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11(4),
404–428.
Panagiotopoulos, P., Sams, S., Elliman, T., & Fitzgerald, G. (2011). Do social networking
groups support online petitions? Transforming Government People Process and Policy,
5(1), 20–31.
Picazo-Vela, S., Gutierrez-Martinez, I., & Luna-Reyes, L. F. (2012). Understanding risks,
benefits, and strategic alternatives of social media applications in the public sector.
Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 504–511.
Reddick, C. G., & Turner, M. (2012). Channel choice and public service delivery in Canada:
Comparing e-government to traditional service delivery. Government Information
Quarterly, 29(1), 1–11.
Sandoval-Almazan, R., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Luna-Reyes, L., Luna-Reyes, D., & Diaz-Murillo, G.
(2011). The use of Web 2.0 on Mexican state websites: A three-year assessment.
Electronic Government, 9(2), 107–121.
Snead, J. T. (2013). Social media use in the U.S. executive branch. Government Information
Quarterly, 30(1), 56–63.
Sobkowicz, P. A., Kaschesky, M.A., & Bouchard, G. B. (2012). Opinion mining in social
media: Modeling, simulating, and forecasting political opinions in the web.
Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 470–479.
Stylios, G., Christodoulakis, D., Besharat, J., Kotrotsos, I., Koumpouri, A., & Stamou, S.
(2010). Public opinion mining for governmental decisions. Electronic Journal of
Electronic Government, 8(2), 202–213.
Whitmore, A. (2012). Extracting knowledge from U.S. Department of Defense Freedom of
Information Act requests with social media. Government Information Quarterly, 29(2),
151–157.
Wimmer, M., Scherer, S., Moss, S., & Bicking, M. (2012). Method and tools to support
stakeholder engagement in policy development: The OCOPOMO project. International
Journal of Electronic Government Research, 8(3), 98–119.
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan is an Assistant Professor in the Research Center of Business
College in the Autonomous State University of Mexico, in Toluca City. He has lectured on
topics such as Information Systems for Business, Information Systems Strategy for
Business; Electronic Commerce Development; Digital Divide in Emergent Countries;
Organization Theory, Database Applications, Statistics, Web Development, Quantitative
Analysis and Modeling, Research Methods, Public Administration Theory, and Local
Government Management. Dr. Sandoval-Almazan is the author or co-author of articles
in Handbook of Research on Public Information Technology; Journal of Information Technology
for Development; Electronic Journal of Information Systems Research, and Espacios Públicos.
His research interests include electronic government, information technologies and
organizations, social networks, digital divide technology, and multi-method research
approaches. Dr. Sandoval-Almazan has a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and
Public Administration, a Master's in Management focused on Marketing, and a Ph.D. in
Management with Information Systems.
326 J.I. Criado et al. / Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia is a Professor in the Department of Public Administration and the
Director of the Data Center for Applied Research in Social Sciences at Centro de
Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. Currently, he is also a
Research Fellow at the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State
University of New York (SUNY) and a Faculty Affiliate at the National Center for Digital
Government, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a former Fulbright Scholar.
Dr. Gil-Garcia is the author or co-author of articles in Government Information Quarterly,
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, European Journal of
Information Systems, The International Public Management Journal, Journal of Government
Information, International Journal of Electronic Government Research, Public Finance and
Management, International Journal of Cases on Electronic Commerce, and International
Journal of Electronic Governance, among other academic journals. His research interests
include collaborative electronic government, inter-organizational information integration,
digital divide policies, adoption and implementation of emergent technologies, education
policy, public policy evaluation, and multi-method research approaches.
J. Ignacio Criado is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and
International Relations, at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. He has been
a visiting researcher at different international institutions, a visiting fellow at Oxford
Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and a postdoctoral visiting scholar at the
Center for Technology in Government, State University of New York (SUNY at
Albany). He is an the author or co-author of articles published in Social Science
Computer Review, Information Polity, International Journal of Electronic Governance,
Internacional Journal of Public Sector Management, Gestión y Política Pública, Innovar
or Reforma y Democracia. He is an editorial board member of Internacional Journal of
Public Sector Management (UK), Revista Española de Ciencia Política (Spain) and
Espacios Públicos (Mexico). His research, training, and consultancy experience
include government 2.0, social media, open government, interoperability, inter-
organizational collaboration, Europeanisation of e-government, leadership in the
public sector, Latin American public administration, and citizens' perception and
evaluation of public services.