Public Sector Adoption of Social Media

Abstract

Social media technologies offer substantial opportunities to public sector organizations for developing community-based partnerships by facilitating engagement with citizens. Yet, public sector social media adoption remains an under-researched phenomenon, which at least partially is attributed to the unique challenges and idiosyncrasies of public sector organizations. We take an analytical approach to examine qualitative evidence sourced from interviews with twenty-four local government organizations across Australia, and contribute to the existing body of knowledge. We induce a range of technological, organizational, and environmental factors that can impact on the social media adoption decisions in local government organizations. The interactions among these factors are also examined. In a dynamic environment where social media use is changing quickly, our findings about social media adoption factors can be useful to many stakeholders, including public sector adoption decision makers, social media and communication officers.

Digital leadership in action in a hospital through a real time dashboard system implementation and experience

“…Theories like the technology acceptance model [18][19][20] are focused on individual level adoption, while technology assimilation models [15,20,21] were studied for organizational level adoption. These models in general assume that the innovation process starts with some early exploration by an individual or a unit and, based on its demonstrated success, gets diffused to others in the organization.…”

When Public Utilities Like to Talk on Facebook

“…The outcome of the utilities stakeholder engagement on Facebook might be affected by a variety of factors, such as the company's specification (Sharif et al 2015;Nah and Saxton 2012), the communication interactivity (Bauer et al 2012) and the resources spent (Picazo-Vela et al 2012). The proposed interdependencies of the factors are summarized in Fig.…”

“…In comparison to the one-way communication of traditional media, Facebook's special strength seems to lie in two-sided interaction, enabling the company to collect stakeholder information, increase stakeholder engagement (Sharif et al 2015;Agostino 2013;Hofmann et al 2013;Mergel 2013) and strengthen stakeholder relationship (Kim et al 2014;Yi et al 2013;Waters et al 2009). The communication interactivity might be affected by the company's specifications (Sharif et al 2015;Mergel 2012) and the available resources (Picazo-Vela et al…”

“…Another aspect of the company's specifications is ownership structure. Sharif et al (2015) emphasizes the fundamental differences between public sector organizations and private sector firms. To be more precise, public organizations and private firms seem to have different cultural environments for an adoption of social media communication which might strongly impact stakeholder interactivity on Facebook and its outcomes (Sharif et al 2015;Mergel 2012).…”

“…Similarly, the use of social media in the public sector, especially in government agencies, is progressively focused (Manetti et al 2016;Oliveira and Welch 2013;Mossberger et al 2013;Bonsón et al 2012). However, the public management literature on social media can still seen to be in its infancy (Sharif et al 2015;Agostino 2013;Criado et al 2013). Only a minority of studies emphasizes the application of social media by public organisations such as utility companies (Martin and Grueb 2016).…”