Egm report e-Government and New Technologies: Towards Better Citizen

Social Media Government Toolbox

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Most of the popular social media sites were designed for individuals and not for 

businesses or governments. However, businesses have embraced the use of social media 

technologies as a means to better engage with the customer, and local governments have 

followed the same path initially focusing on citizens as customers. The evolution continues 

with governments experimenting with new applications that are geared towards engaging 

citizens as rightful stakeholders as one way of helping to restore trust. Shark pointed out as 

have the other EGM participants that there is much more to citizen engagement than a website 

or mobile phone application. Aside from any technical requirements, there are public 

administration requirements (training and developing staff capacity), and finally there are 

financial and policy requirements for sustainable services and well-thought out systems. The 

following list just a few of the policy concerns that need to be addressed by any government 

authority contemplating civic engagement programmes and services.  

 

•  What is your policy on social media? 

•  URL links? 

•  Privacy& disclosure? 

•  Citizen postings? 

•  Cookies? 

•  Network/system security? 

•  Government employees (general)? 

•  Government issued laptops, PDAs, etc. 

•  Restrictions to usage & communications? 

•  Who is in charge of overall “communications”?  

•  Who monitors social media, frequency, content? 

                                                 

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 Shark (2010) 

•  Social Network 

•  Wiki 

•  Mashup 

•  RSS Feed 

•  Listserv - Alerts 

•  Blog – Micro Blog 

•  Geo Mapping 

•  Search Engine Utility 

 

•  Online Survey 

•  Photo Sharing  

•  Webcast – Webcam 

•  Video Blog/Vlog – Video 

Sharing 

•  Podcast - Vodcast 

•  Virtual World - Games 

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e-Government and New Technologies: Towards better citizen engagement for development 

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•  How frequently is social media monitored? 

•  Training and competency polices? 

More perplexing are issues involving citizen engagement and social media

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 include:  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                 

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 Shark (2010)