Social Media Adoption and Use by Australian Capital City Local Governments

Abstract

This chapter explores social media adoption and use by Australian capital city local governments. Despite digital communication with the community being an integral part of modern local government functions, the types of digital communication being used are not commonly monitored or analyzed in the Australian context. This chapter provides an investigation of the types of social media being employed by local governments and a sentiment analysis of Twitter accounts from a sample of local governments in Sydney. The results suggest that social media is being used in a variety of forms according to the size and function of the local governments and is infl uenced by the level of Twitter activity undertaken by the mayor. IntroductionModern society has become reliant on online services and its infl uences on the way in which people communicate with one another (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002 ). Many of us conduct a signifi cant part of our lives online paying bills, ordering groceries, booking travel, biding on auctions, and catching up with long lost friends. Social media has built on the communication capabilities of the Internet to play a signifi cant role in changing the way people communicate with each other and with organizations. Information and communications technology has tremendous administration potential in that it can aid organizations with interconnectivity, service delivery, effi ciency and effectiveness, transparency, and accountability (Yildiz 2007 ). One of the outcomes of this growth in online interaction has been the establishment of e-government. E-government was originally defi ned as the utilization of the Internet to deliver government information and services to citizens. E-government defi nitions have since been extended by the emergence of Web 2.0. O'Reilly ( 2005 ) coined the term Web 2.0 to distinguish Internet technologies that feature the

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