Government innovation through social media

Government Information Quarterly 30 (2013) 319–326

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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 b c

Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain Accounting and Business Administration Department, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, Mexico Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE), Mexico

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 18 November 2013 Keywords: Social media e-Government Twitter Facebook Web 2.0 Innovation Digital government Government 2.0

a b s t r a c t 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 media for the innovation of public sector organizations. Most of these contributions have focused on the technical dimensions of social media, while other aspects have not attracted equal attention. In contrast, this introductory article interrogates the role of social media in the basic areas of e-government: government information flows and the availability of government information; the use of information technology to create and provide innovative government services; the impact of information technology on the relationships between the governed and those governing; and the increasing importance of information policies and information technologies for democratic practices. Accordingly, the next few pages propose and develop three dimensions 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 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: [email protected] (J.I. Criado), [email protected] (R. Sandoval-Almazan), [email protected] (J.R. Gil-Garcia). 0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.10.003

of common interests in different conferences and journals within the egovernment 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 mediabased data sharing model; and social media-based real-time collaborative 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.

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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, participation, and collaboration. Finally, the conclusions of her work illuminate that the biggest challenge is not this new generation of social technologies themselves, but the adaptation of them to the given political and administrative situations and government institutional settings. Accordingly, like other previous technologies (Fountain, 2001; GilGarcía, 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 research 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 understood 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 LunaReyes (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 technologies 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 understanding of previous studies about social media in government. Some dimensions profile the emerging research on social media within the egovernment 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), microblogging (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


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, GutierrezMartinez, & 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

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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 & LunaReyes, 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.

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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 compliance 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 approach 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 generalization 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 policymaking 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 automation 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.


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 netsavvy 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 communication 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 twentyfive 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 abovementioned five properties of social media (up-to-date provision of information, marketing, co-design, transactions, and using multimedia 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 communication 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 government 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

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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 coproduction 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 arrangements 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 technologies. 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

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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 realtime 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 methodologies 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. Consequently, 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 technologies 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 technologies to foster participation, co-production of services, and citizens' general engagement with public authorities. The continuous development 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 wikigovernment fashion, may fundamentally alter the centrality of governments 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 technological 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 governmental 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


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.

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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.

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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, interorganizational collaboration, Europeanisation of e-government, leadership in the public sector, Latin American public administration, and citizens' perception and evaluation of public services.