How It Can Help Shape Government Performance

In social media forums, it is important for citizen perception that an agency is well informed and able to provide services that truly meet their needs and interests. Social media activity by citizens is growing exponentially and there is some evidence that certain gov-ernment agencies are embracing these engagement, and communication tools, albeit at a far slower pace than other societal sectors. The on-going challenge is that the government generally lags behind when it comes to adoption of technology tools. Social media tools and social media analytics are no exception. While this paper focuses on civilian government agencies, it’s fair to say all federal agencies are playing catch up with commonly employed social media communication platforms. The government is even further behind in the area of social media analytics, the aggregation of data from online communication tools and the interpretation of this data to form actionable and relevant information. As government institutions mature in their usage of social media tools, agency en-gagement strategies would benefit greatly from incorporating analysis of the public online dialog. Social media analytics helps identify meaningful topics, demographic information, and other relevant knowledge that is important to the general public. Solutions to the challenge of this knowledge discovery from the magnitude of social media data must be automated and sophisticated enough to de-tect sentiment, trends, influencers, and real time issues as they arise. The basis of any social media analytics solution will be the power of its search and discovery knowledge engine