Twitter ≠ transparency

I am a strong advocate for government transparency. As I have written before, one of the greatest causes of conflict between citizens and their governments has been, in my estimation, a lack of clear communication between these two integral parties. Transparency can help to change that dynamic by improving the ability of citizens to know about and understand how their governments function.

Like many government transparency advocates, I believe that the Internet can provide citizens with reliable, useful platforms to achieve these goals. Yet I also see a troubling trend, a lack of clear understanding on the part of the public sector about the nature of web enabled transparency. In short, many in government conflate the use of social media tools with open government.

There is nothing wrong with a government or public agency using tools such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, et al. They are all powerful platforms that can achieve interesting goals. One high profile example of the power of Twitter was the use of the system by civil protesters in Iran to communicate despite repressive action by the government.

Just because revolutionaries in Iran used Twitter, however, doesn’t mean your city, county, or other jurisdiction should. An article in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper recently reported about an in progress study of public sector Twitter use:

Hundreds of congressmen and other federal, state and local politicians use the popular social networking site to send out messages to constituents, journalists and other followers. But like the average user, even members of Congress do not keep things strictly business on the Internet — the vast majority use Twitter for self-promotion.

Only 20 percent of congressional tweets actually improved government transparency or communication with citizens, according to research from the information studies college.

“There wasn’t a lot of new insights that you could get from reading the posts,” said Jennifer Golbeck, an information studies professor who led the study. “People could have posted really insightful or useful information, even with the character limits, but there wasn’t a lot of that.”

Besides self-promotion, most of the tweets served other informational purposes, such as announcing TV and radio appearances and providing links to blogs and newspaper articles.

The study also found that 53 percent of tweets were “informational” and 27 percent dealt with the leaders’ “locations and activities.” On the other hand, only 5 percent of tweets dealt with “official business.”

Why is this happening? Well certainly one aspect is that Twitter can be an effective way to promote something, so it is natural that a class of public leaders dependent on votes will want to use the platform in this way. It goes beyond this, however. Twitter, by the nature of its platform, encourages frequent updating. It’s like a blog on hyper speed, or a text message broadcast to the world.

What it seems is that many who use Twitter in the public sector seem not to have asked themselves is “is this platform the tool I need to accomplish my goals?” Twitter, like all social media, is just that, no more than a tool. As tools, each has a different aspect, different specialty, and different requirements to be used effectively.

The lesson is that for the public sector to effectively use social media, thought must be given to what task needs to be performed or what goal needs to be achieved. Using every social media tool simply because it is there will lead to scattered, ineffective communication with the public, and will also waste valuable staff time. So by all means, use Twitter — or any other social media platform — but use it because its the best tool for the job, not just because its shiny and new.