a tale of two cities a comparative study of government use of social media in new york city and...
DESCRIPTION
Questions What types of information are shared by the cities governments on Twitter/Weibo? What are the similarities/differences? Discussion: How the differences of the two social media platforms have influenced the ways in which the two cities’ governments use the social media as a new way to implement e- government?TRANSCRIPT
A tale of two cities A comparative study of government use of social media
in New York City and Shanghai
Hong Shen[CAS587:Cuture As Data]
Twitter VS Sina WeiboTwitter Weibo
started July 2006 August 2009
users 500 million worldwide 324 million in China
character count
140 characters - amounting to one short
sentence
140 Chinese characters – the equivalent of around 70
– 80 wordsContent
of tweets Including text and links Including text, pictures, videos, links and long posts
Questions• What types of information are shared by
the cities governments on Twitter/Weibo?• What are the similarities/differences?• Discussion: How the differences of the
two social media platforms have influenced the ways in which the two cities’ governments use the social media as a new way to implement e-government?
nycgov@twitter
shanghaicity@weibo
Method: content analysis
Data collection:Tweets/posts on both accounts from Aug 1st to Aug 31st in 2012
NYC: 167 tweetsShanghai: 524 posts
Non-exclusive Categories: • Service
information• Traffic Information• Weather
Information• City life/culture
broadcasting• Reply/Mention• Retweet• Links• Others
Open codingapproach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998)
Main observations• Reply/mention are extremely common
on both accounts• NYC has more tweets containing links.• While NYC has more tweets on service
information; Shanghai has more posts about city culture/life broadcasting
• Shanghai has more posts on traffic/weather information
Discussion• Language: English VS Chinese• Interface and functionalities: Sina
Weibo is much more complex than Twitter
• While NYC’s use of social media focuses more on information sharing, social media works more like a promotional/branding tool for Shanghai