Digital technology has advanced the ways in which people and groups communicate with each other. Nowadays it is not enough to have an online presence and assume that all interactions and communications between the owners and the users of this presence are happening on it. With the rise of Social Media, communication in regards to issues that are related to a company/government agency/product etc. are also happening on other platforms where the control on the
content of these dialogues is not fully in the control of the owners.
Given the nature of the topic and its importance, below we have provided a small introduction about social media in an effort to put it in context of what we are trying to achieve as guidelines for it in this document.
Social Media in general is:
- A noticeable shift in how people discover, read and share information and content, including generating their own based on what they have read and saw.
- Content has been shared online for a long time through email, instant messaging, etc. Social media has transformed these monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) by leveraging more advanced highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies
- Our audience is now transformed from content readers into publishers
- The audience is now using social media platforms to talk about us and not only use our website to talk with us.
Proper use of Social Media can help governmental agencies to better understand, react, attract the attention of audiences and interact with them at the same time. It enables real two-way communication with people in the places where they are already talking.
Adopting social media as a way to market your service will provide benefits to the government agency. Some of which are highlighted below:
- Increase government’s agency access to audiences that are available in places other than their website.
- Improve overall government communication on both the internal and external level
- Enable the government entity to be more active in its relationships with citizens and stakeholders
- Use of a new communication channel that will guarantee long-term cost effectiveness of communication
- Reduce the dependence on traditional media channels and counter inaccurate press coverage
- Enhance and increase the feedback of the public
- Target specific audiences on specific issues
- Etc.
The use of Social Media makes engagement and interaction with the public simple, quick and also powerful. Social Media assists in the location and identification of users that are called “influencers” as well as provide usefulness and effectiveness in providing mechanisms for combating negative publicity including the measurement of the public sentiment to help inform public policy.