Strategic communication? Measurement and evaluation of Twitter use among municipal governments

Government entities utilize social media to communicate with primary, secondary, and tertiary constituents. The microblog Twitter serves as a rapid and inexpensive means of communication, allowing municipal governments to reach a large and diverse audience with limited time or resource costs. Lacking in the existing research are examinations of whether governments are using social media outlets like Twitter as strategic communication tools or merely as ad-hoc communication outlets. By applying the Barcelona Principles 3.0 as the theoretical framework, this study explores whether U.S. municipalities measure and evaluate their Twitter activity as part of a formal communications process informed by modern public relations standards, an whether differences in municipal resources and demographics predict the integration of social media measurement and evaluation. The results suggest that while formal communication plans are reported to exist, there is not a sufficient presence of goals, policies, procedures, and metrics to consider Twitter a formal, strategic communication tool for participating municipalities. Total population and the administrative role of the social media account manager were also found to impact the perception of defined procedures and specific assessment metrics. Though these results suggest a lack of formal integration of social media measurement and evaluation, more research is needed to explore the factors which may impact this situation.     

Reading the least read? Indicators of users' intention to consult privacy statements on municipal websites

Though seldom read or consulted, privacy statements are often the only means for users to know how their personal data will be used by collecting organizations. While the length and the legalistic nature of most privacy statements are often blamed for people's reluctance to consult such documents, studies on the factors that influence users' intention to read privacy statements are still non-existent. For this survey, respondents from the Netherlands were presented with the situation of registering a child for a basic school through their municipalities' websites. The scenario was selected since it was assumed that it would be one that would require a significant amount of personal data from registrants, and not just the usual contact information. Results of the conducted online survey reveal that although not all users consult a privacy statement on a municipal website before they would disclose personal data, the availability and the ease of finding them on a municipal website strongly contribute to users' belief that a municipality can be trusted with their personal data whenever they are shared for a particular online transaction. This study also shows that users' perceptions of the risks involved in the online disclosure of their personal data influenced their intention to read online privacy statements on municipal websites. Older users were also more likely to consult privacy statements than their younger counterparts, while those with lower levels of education and internet experience expressed a higher tendency to read such online documents than those with higher levels of education and internet experience.