Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government
Introduction
Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, constitute what has been called the 5th wave of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (Mergel, 2012). Similar to their technological predecessors, this new wave of technologies has been widely adopted by governments because of their potential to transform government operations, especially in terms of creating networks and increasing citizen participation (Kim, 2013, Lev-On and Steinfeld, 2015, Mergel, 2013a, Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013, Mossberger et al., 2013, Reddick and Norris, 2013). In spite of the high hopes for increasing public participation and innovation, empirical evidence in government suggests that social media contributes –like other previous ICT—to a gradual process of transformation inside governments, serving as an additional channel to “push” information to citizens without increasing participation (Bonsón et al., 2015, Mossberger et al., 2013, Reddick and Norris, 2013, Zavattaro et al., 2015, Zheng and Zheng, 2014).
On the other hand, empirical evidence from the private sector, particularly from the media industry, suggests that social media can actually transform radically the landscape of the entire industry (Mergel, 2013b). In the case of government, however, there is a high level of uncertainty in the adoption process because of the lack of control over technology changes (main social media are third-party managed) as well as in the public-driven information interests (Mergel, 2013b). These characteristics of social media conflict with current organizational routines – particularly communication practices—and institutional frameworks (Mergel, Schweik, & Fountain, 2009). In fact, such organizational and institutional factors constitute the main hurdles for social media adoption. Thus, there is a call for understanding interactions among technology, institutions, and organizations to open the black box of social media use in government to better understand not only adoption, but also strategic approaches and concrete applications of social media (Criado et al., 2013, Mergel, 2013b). However, most research has focused on understanding interactions among users of social media (Robertson et al., 2013, Sandoval-Almazan and Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014, Tobias, 2011), on main stages or determinants of social media adoption (Bonsón et al., 2012, Kavanaugh et al., 2012, Mergel, 2013b, Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013, Nah and Saxton, 2013), and more recently, on understanding the engaging effect of different types of individual government messages sent through social media (Bonsón et al., 2015, Lev-On and Steinfeld, 2015, Zavattaro et al., 2015). In this way, our contribution is to fill this gap in the literature by describing in more detail a specific application of social media as well as providing some theoretical insights in the process of developing social media strategies in government.
In this paper, we describe a case in the State of Puebla, Mexico, in which the State government used social media as a component of a social marketing strategy to promote good health habits among citizens called Puebla Sana (Healthy Puebla). People of the Ministry of Health created a strategy that evolved to better accommodate to the characteristics of each social network, changing some organizational characteristics and creating new networks. In other words, the initial strategy was modified as a result of the influence of various stakeholders involved in the project, other actors in social media, as well as the specific features of each social media platform that each stakeholder group has adopted (Cordella & Hesse, 2015). The case illustrates the sociomateriality (Kallinikos et al., 2013, Orlikowski and Scott, 2008) of social media and helps us explain ways in which technical characteristics interact with the social, organizational, and institutional environments as a whole. Moreover, recognizing these shifting assemblages of social and technical aspects embedded in social media results in a series of practical implications for public managers.
To accomplish this objective, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section offers a brief introduction. Section 2 includes a review of the relevant literature on the ensemble/assemble and social media use in government. Section 3 includes a description of the methods used in this research. Section 4 describes the case of Puebla Sana, its antecedents, and its evolution. Section 5 constitutes a discussion and concluding remarks.
Section snippets
Literature review
Governments have adopted social media following a combination of market and mimetic forces (Mergel, 2012, Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013, Reddick and Norris, 2013). That is to say, governments are interested in social media partly because they are widely adopted not only by citizens, but also by other governments. Mexico, the main context for this research, is not the exception, and most state governments are using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to engage in conversations with
Methods
The research reported in this paper follows a case study approach (Stake, 1995, Yin, 1994). The case study approach focuses on current events, typically to answer questions of how and why, like the ones that we address in this paper (Yin, 1994). The case study selected for this research is a social marketing program named Puebla Sana, which was adopted by the State of Puebla in Mexico as a component of a wider policy to improve public health. The program started in the first half of 2011 using
Puebla Sana: a social marketing program
In 1986, the World Health Organization organized the First International Conference on Health Promotion. One of the key products of this first meeting in Ottawa, Canada, was the Charter for Health Promotion, a joint declaration to achieve health for all. The charter motivated the countries around the world started to design health policies, including health promotion. The main goal of health promotion is to give people more control over their own health with education and other preventive
Discussion and conclusions
In the previous section, we described the particular social media practices of the Ministry of Health in the State of Puebla, Mexico. Such practices involved the use of Facebook and Twitter to broadcast social marketing messages in a more continuous way, referring to or pointing at what actors perceived as a “more permanent” content hosted in a blog and YouTube. These practices of using social media were evolving. That is to say, actors in the Puebla Sana program did not plan to use social
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