Governments' Love-Hate Relationship with Social Media

Governments all over the world make policies; policies that affect citizens in myriad ways. Citizens usually have a view on these and some of them choose various medium - news and print media, public polls, protests, petitions, and increasingly social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to express their opinions.

In a much highlighted incident in December 2012 in Delhi concerning safety of women, apart from mass rallies and protests on the street, people actively voiced their thoughts on different social media websites. That month, Nirbhaya was the top trend on Twitter India, where hundreds of tweets condemning the incident, grieving the death and demanding reforms could be seen. Google India posted its own tribute to the deceased with a post on Google+.

We can also infer that this agitation and debate on social media eventually influenced the movement and made the Government re-look at some of its policies around protecting women in India.

The reach of social media and the high levels of participation open opportunities for public debate on the functioning of governments, and the policies they introduce or enforce.

Government, its agencies and organizations, have also understood how powerful this medium can be for engaging with citizens – for seeking feedback, creating awareness on different initiatives, creating a participative model of governance, etc

But this is easier said than done.

While social networks facilitate a wide range of topics for conversations and interactions; the high volume and constantly incoming messages from a vast number of anonymous and identifiable users makes it difficult to separate the "signal from noise"

A couple of examples can help us understand why this engagement with citizens via social networks is a daunting task.

In an effort to enlist citizens’ help in identifying specific places where roads can be improved, Bengaluru's municipal corporation initiated a campaign encouraging citizens to take a picture or video of the road-pot-holes they spot, and upload it to the corporation's website, and the corporation would then address the issue.

From the municipal corporation's perspective, they are engaging citizens to help them with the maintenance of the city; but then it is an overwhelming task to keep up with all the information and responses that pour in.

How do they effectively deal with all these responses, and sift through them to identify ones that matter, and also provide feedback to respondents that the issue is being attended to. It is likely that there are going to be several misses. Citizens are likely to get frustrated as they are taking the initiative to be good citizens and the municipal officials will be lumped with yet another ‘tried but didn't succeed initiative’. So the question then arises is why can’t the corporation choose to use existing social networks – youtube, facebook, twitter –to glean this content, instead of creating or maintaining a website just for this purpose?

India Post recently set up a twitter account, more from a brand building or public relations perspective. This twitter account would broadcast details of philately events, and India Post accomplishments, or various postal policies. The social network community's response, on Twitter, was varied as expected; there were laudatory messages, endorsement, complaints about postal packages not reaching on time, or other service related issues. This flood of heterogeneous messages could drown the brand building effort that India Post started out with. How can India Post make use of the community to not only build a brand image for themselves, but also engage the community to provide an effective means to address the other topics of conversations that arise?

These examples highlight how government agencies are trying to use the web and social networks to engage meaningfully with citizens but are struggling with this objective. So, how can they do this effectively?

Technology to the rescue of Technology

This setting captures what is known as a BigData problem - a problem where one has to sift through huge volumes of data or information, and make sense of it, considering the hectic pace at which it is generated (also known as velocity), and the variety of topics that this data contains.

Additionally, when it comes to the nature of this data - especially ones created in social networks or social media - this is written or made available in a free-form manner; there is content available as it is spoken, with a healthy mix of spelling mistakes, slang, abbreviations, colloquial styles, grammar, irony, sarcasm, and is even expressed in a mix of languages.

This level of complexity makes it a daunting task to make sense of what is being said. This is where BigData based technology solutions look towards computational linguistics - a field of study where the nature of language, and the means to make sense of it is codified, thus enabling processing via computers.

BigData also includes computational techniques to deal with huge amounts of data, and a means to sift through them, and collate the results, for further analysis.

Taking the example of government agencies wanting to engage with their citizen to "seek feedback from citizens", the intention is to understand the sentiments or opinions expressed by citizens around a topic or a policy. Using computational linguistic techniques, with the application of a relevant set of algorithms, these sentiments can be detected, and analyzed to understand the ones that matter, and also gain insights on what needs to be done to address them.

The application of BigData techniques along with computational linguistics, to make sense of social media content, is called Social Media Analytics.

Quite a few governments around the world are introducing white-papers or strategy documents to lay down guidelines for governmental agencies to engage in social media:  India, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and United States of America are some examples of such countries.

These strategies, to be effective, need to be complemented by social media analysis capabilities. Or else, instead of talking to each other to shape public policy, they’ll talk at each other.

 By: Kiran Subbaraman Kiran is a leader in big data and social media analysis technologies, at IBM’s India Software Lab

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.