Yesterday, I and some other members of my department attended a talk by John Liao concerning the social media optimization (SMO) of government portal sites. John has some really good ideas, and I really suggest taking a look at his blog, if you read Chinese. It seems the talk he delivered to us a little more simple on the social media side, but heavy on the government initiative side – which seems appropriate given the audience. I drafted up a mind map about E-government and Web 2.0 from his talk:
E-government and Social Media Mind Map
Here are a few observations from this mind map:
- Governments must engage in SMO (social media optimization) as well as SEO (search engine optimization), but this is only the most superficial element of e-government implementation.
- The connections between government generated and user generated content focused around the mutual use of blogs, but the direction was pushing our from government content, not in. This implies that government created content on Web 2.0 services, such as blogs, facebook, and multimedia (flickr, Youtube, etc.), are the essential success factor in establishing communication channels with users. Government-side blogs are used to gather numerous other kinds of social media into one news paper like source, and provide subscribers with RSS feeds. Posts can vary in content from a photo of government officials on vacation, to announcing new flagship e-government services such as tax payments and health insurance tools.
- The best method to attract new users through Web 2.0 services is generating consistently interesting or attractive content in at least one medium (e.g. text, video, photo).
- The above techniques for drawing the attention and establishing communication channels which users will pay attention to are wasted if actual government services are not accessed.
- The most important step is creating government services which people need.
- Identifying peoples need via market research is a priority, in this regard, government may need to think more like business.
- This is the start of T-government, or the use of E-government to transform the internal structure.
In actuality, only one element of SMO is difficult to achieve – the reorganization websites in a citizen-centric fashion. For example, we no longer should be listing services under the websites of the individual departments providing the service, but rather listed by category in one place, up front, on the government portal. The reorganization will require a team, or at least a project manager, working across many departments. The technology to accomplish these tasks is already being used within most governments, and can be deployed at low cost. One point often overlooked in the optimism surrounding e-government is that the crux of this change is both organizational and societal, but not technological. There is no digital panacea for bridging the gap that exists between most countries’ governments and citizens.
The more key element of developing successful e-government, and by far the more difficult, is new service development. While challenging, changing government’s new service development process to be focused on citizen-centric e-government has the potential to unlock the transformational power of e-government initiatives. This later stage of e-government, called t-government, may very well change the way decisions are made inside the bureaucracy. T-government will create a new set of decision making processes, starting as at the new service development level, which will inherit the democratic, cloud sourced, and decentralized nature of the Web 2.0 platform.