icegov2012 proceedings

also focus on the research of social media and government. Due to
the research
of government institutional microblogs, most of the papers in
China have just conducted descriptive study, and we did not found
any papers that study in-depth the content and interactions on
government microblogs as well as their implications. This paper
attempts to fill up this gap.
3. RESEARCH METHOD
The study explores the applications of government institutional
microblogs, focusing on the interaction between government and
citizens. The main methods are case study, observation, and
content analysis.
3.1 Cases Selected
Government institutional microblogs for study are selected from
the government category of the most influential microblog
operator in China, which are called Sina Weibo. Various
microblogs are selected to include microblogs run by police
department, transportation department, municipal department and
other government agencies, and to cover different levels of
government, different regions, and different departments.
“Influence” and "the number of followers" are also considered in
choosing these microblogs.
At last, ten different government institutional microblogs are
selected, "Weibo Yunan", "Weibo Hebei", "Weibo Yinchuan",
"Jinshan Communication", "The People's Government of Taoyuan
County", "Weibo Ninghai", "Sichuan Transportation", "Civilized
Hefei", "The People's Procuratorate of Hubei" and "Peace
Southern-Guangdong". Two of them are provincial government
microblogs, two are municipal government microblogs, two are
county government microblogs, and four are government
department microblogs, which covers the east, middle and west
regions of China.
3.2 Data Analysis Methods
All messages posted during May 30, 2011 (0:00 AM) to June 5,
2011 (0:00 PM) are collected from the ten selected government
institutional microblogs. At last, 206 messages are studied. The
coding and analytical framework of this study is designed after
conducting four focus-group discussions with 80 government
employess who work at different levels in Shanghai Municipal
Government. Specific aspects are analyzed and coded such as
messages’ number, message content, message types, message
forms, message sources, directing, language styles, relevant
stakeholders, associated levels, attitudes of comments,
commenter’s types, and government responses (See Table 1). The
processed data are then analyzed with descriptive statistics and
cross-tab methods by using the software of SPSS.
4. FINDINGS:STATISTICAL RESULTS
4.1 Messages’ Number
The table 2 shows the number of messages issued by each
government institutional microblogs in the selected seven days.
The number of “Weibo Yinchuan”’s messages are 60, accounting
for 29.1% of all the messages. The least number of messages are
2, which are issued by “The People's Government of Taoyuan
County”.
395
Table 2: Messages’ number
4.2 Message Content
The message contents can be divided into four categories,
Name Quantity Percentage
Weibo Yinchuan 60 29.1
Peace Southern-Guangdong 29 14.1
Sichuan Transportation 25 12.1
Weibo Ninghai 18 8.7
Weibo Yunan 17 8.3
Weibo Hebei 15 7.3
The People's Procuratorate of
Hubei
14 6.8
Jinshan Communication 13 6.3
Civilized Hefei 13 6.3
The People's Government of
Taoyuan County
2 1.0
Total 206 100.0
including Government Message; Public Service Message;
News and Interaction Message. This categorization is nonexclusive,
which means one message could be categorized into
several categories. Specifically, the Government Message refers
to messages for the internal purposes of government; the Public
Service Message mainly contains the news like weather forecast,
healthy advices and so on. The "News" covers the generic field
and all recent events in society are included. Interaction Message
is divided into four different levels, including Question
Answering Message, Explaining Message, Comments Message
and Advices Collecting Message. There are 88 Government
Messages in the collected data, accounting for 42.7%; There are
76, 50 and 40 News, Public Service Messages and Interaction
Message respectively, accounting for 36.9%, 24.3% and 19.4%.
The data show that most of the messages issued by government
institutional microblogs mainly focus on the government’s
internal business rather than on the public services and
interactions with citizens.
As mentioned above, the Interaction Message is divided into
Question Answering Message, Explaining Message, Comments
Message and Advices Collecting Message. The “Question
Answering Message” means the government can answer citizens’
questions through the Microblogs’ platform directly; The
“Explaining Message” means the government can explain some
specific questions; The “Comments” means the microblog site is
also a platform for the government to make comments on some
social events; The “Advices Collecting Message” means the
government uses the microblog platform to collect comments and
advices from the citizens. In the 40 Interaction Messages, the
Comments Message accounts for 20 messages of all the
Interaction Messages. The following is the “Question Answering
Message”, the “Advices Collecting Message”, and the
“Explaining Message”, occupied for 5, 3 and 2 messages. We can
obviously find that the government doesn’t fully use the
microblog’s available features to interact with citizens.