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Improving Government Services Using Social Media Feedback

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Social Media for Government Services

Abstract

Governments are making increasing use of social media technologies, both to inform citizens of available public government services, and to measure the effectiveness of existing services. We describe Vizie, a social media monitoring system designed to help analysts identify how current government services can be improved, by drawing on the commentary and feedback provided in social media by the public using those services. The Vizie system is designed to support the monitoring of arbitrary web and social media content, independent of topical domain and media type. It utilises a variety of natural language processing and information retrieval methods to highlight, distill, and present public feedback. We describe our analysis of the real-world constraints in which the system operates, based on a user requirements analysis which governed our research and development path, including our choice of text analysis methods. The end result is a system that (1) provides an ability to see an overview of the data as well as drill into explore the data in detail, (2) performs text analytics on the social media retrieved and (3) presents contextual information to enable users to decide when to engage with online communities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-february-2015/. Accessed on April 26th, 2015.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, the report from PewResearchCenter for the USA http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-government/, or, more generally, http://blog.ted.com/how-pervasive-has-government-distrust-gotten/ ̶̶ Both Accessed August 18th, 2015.

  3. 3.

    www.google.com/alerts.

  4. 4.

    Application Programming Interface.

  5. 5.

    www.socialmention.com.

  6. 6.

    http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2015/Enigma-moth-helps-crack-evolutions-code. Accessed August 19th, 2015.

  7. 7.

    www.tweetdeck.com.

  8. 8.

    www.hootsuite.com.

  9. 9.

    www.google.com/alerts.

  10. 10.

    www.socialmention.com.

  11. 11.

    For example, http://cloud.li/.

  12. 12.

    www.twittermap.com

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Acknowledgments

This research has been partially funded under the Human Services Delivery Research Alliance (HSDRA) between the CSIRO and the Australian Government Department of Human Services, the CSIRO, and the “Early Adopters Group” Programme. We would like to thank P. Aghaei Pour, B. Jin, J. McHugh, A. Gall and H. Asghar for their work on the system, all the communications staff at the Australian Government’s Department of Human Services for their support in this work, and all our other users for their invaluable support and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Data61, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Stephen Wan & Cécile Paris

  2. RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Dimitrios Georgakopoulos

Authors
  1. Stephen Wan
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  2. Cécile Paris
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  3. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cécile Paris .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Data61, Marsfield, New South Wales, Australia

    Surya Nepal

  2. Services Flagship, CSIRO Data61, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Cécile Paris

  3. RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Dimitrios Georgakopoulos

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Wan, S., Paris, C., Georgakopoulos, D. (2015). Improving Government Services Using Social Media Feedback. In: Nepal, S., Paris, C., Georgakopoulos, D. (eds) Social Media for Government Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_11

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