Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government

GOVINF-01191; No. of pages: 12; 4C: Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf

Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government Sergio Picazo-Vela a, Marilu Fernandez-Haddad b, Luis F. Luna-Reyes c,⁎ a b c

Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Business Department, Ex – Hda, Sta. Catarina Martir, Cholula 72810, Mexico Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Marketing Department, Ex - Hda. Sta. Catarina Martir, Cholula 72810, Mexico University at Albany, Department of Public Administration and Policy, Milne Hall 206, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 22 December 2014 Received in revised form 22 June 2016 Accepted 10 August 2016 Available online xxxx Keywords: Electronic government Social media Web 2.0 Sociomateriality Assemble view of technology Social marketing Mexico

a b s t r a c t Governments have widely adopted social media as tools to communicate and engage with citizens or as tools for service delivery. Current research suggests that social media adoption in government has been mainly market driven and that the various adoption strategies have resulted from a combination of trial and error, imitation, and both informal and formal knowledge exchanges. Given the nature of the adoption process and the nature of social media, the use of social media in government involves high levels of risk and uncertainty, and the main barriers of adoption lay in the organizational and institutional arrangements of government organizations. Nevertheless, little or no research has looked for the ways in which government organizations design strategies or use social media. In this paper, we open the black box to look at the process of adoption and implementation of social media in a government-lead social marketing program to promote healthy habits among young people living in urban areas, the Puebla Sana (Healthy Puebla) program. The case suggests that commercial social media, such as Facebook, Youtube, or Twitter, are instances of sociomaterial systems, and to take advantage of their features, government organizations need to collaborate with multiple individual and organizational actors in the cocreation of a message to accomplish their goals. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, constitute what has been called the 5th wave of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (Mergel, 2012). Similar to their technological predecessors, this new wave of technologies has been widely adopted by governments because of their potential to transform government operations, especially in terms of creating networks and increasing citizen participation (Kim, 2013; Lev-On & Steinfeld, 2015; Mergel, 2013a; Mergel & Bretschneider, 2013; Mossberger, Wu, & Crawford, 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013). In spite of the high hopes for increasing public participation and innovation, empirical evidence in government suggests that social media contributes –like other previous ICT—to a gradual process of transformation inside governments, serving as an additional channel to “push” information to citizens without increasing participation (Bonsón, Royo, & Ratkai, 2015; Mossberger et al., 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013; Zavattaro, French, & Mohanty, 2015; Zheng & Zheng, 2014). ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Picazo-Vela), [email protected] (M. Fernandez-Haddad), [email protected] (L.F. Luna-Reyes).

On the other hand, empirical evidence from the private sector, particularly from the media industry, suggests that social media can actually transform radically the landscape of the entire industry (Mergel, 2013b). In the case of government, however, there is a high level of uncertainty in the adoption process because of the lack of control over technology changes (main social media are third-party managed) as well as in the public-driven information interests (Mergel, 2013b). These characteristics of social media conflict with current organizational routines – particularly communication practices—and institutional frameworks (Mergel, Schweik, & Fountain, 2009). In fact, such organizational and institutional factors constitute the main hurdles for social media adoption. Thus, there is a call for understanding interactions among technology, institutions, and organizations to open the black box of social media use in government to better understand not only adoption, but also strategic approaches and concrete applications of social media (Criado, Sandoval-Almazan, & Gil-Garcia, 2013; Mergel, 2013b). However, most research has focused on understanding interactions among users of social media (Robertson, Douglas, Maruyama, & Semaan, 2013; Sandoval-Almazan & Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014; Tobias, 2011), on main stages or determinants of social media adoption (Bonsón, Torres, Royo, & Flores, 2012; Kavanaugh et al., 2012; Mergel, 2013b; Mergel & Bretschneider, 2013; Nah & Saxton, 2013), and more recently, on understanding the engaging effect of different types of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004 0740-624X/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

2

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

individual government messages sent through social media (Bonsón et al., 2015; Lev-On & Steinfeld, 2015; Zavattaro et al., 2015). In this way, our contribution is to fill this gap in the literature by describing in more detail a specific application of social media as well as providing some theoretical insights in the process of developing social media strategies in government. In this paper, we describe a case in the State of Puebla, Mexico, in which the State government used social media as a component of a social marketing strategy to promote good health habits among citizens called Puebla Sana (Healthy Puebla). People of the Ministry of Health created a strategy that evolved to better accommodate to the characteristics of each social network, changing some organizational characteristics and creating new networks. In other words, the initial strategy was modified as a result of the influence of various stakeholders involved in the project, other actors in social media, as well as the specific features of each social media platform that each stakeholder group has adopted (Cordella & Hesse, 2015). The case illustrates the sociomateriality (Kallinikos, Aaltonen, & Marton, 2013; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) of social media and helps us explain ways in which technical characteristics interact with the social, organizational, and institutional environments as a whole. Moreover, recognizing these shifting assemblages of social and technical aspects embedded in social media results in a series of practical implications for public managers. To accomplish this objective, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section offers a brief introduction. Section 2 includes a review of the relevant literature on the ensemble/assemble and social media use in government. Section 3 includes a description of the methods used in this research. Section 4 describes the case of Puebla Sana, its antecedents, and its evolution. Section 5 constitutes a discussion and concluding remarks. 2. Literature review Governments have adopted social media following a combination of market and mimetic forces (Mergel, 2012; Mergel & Bretschneider, 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013). That is to say, governments are interested in social media partly because they are widely adopted not only by citizens, but also by other governments. Mexico, the main context for this research, is not the exception, and most state governments are using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to engage in conversations with citizens (Sandoval-Almazán, Gil-Garcia, Luna, Luna-Reyes, & Diaz-Murillo, 2011; Sandoval-Almazan, Nava-Rogel, & Gómez-Díaz, 2012). Most states are however using social media mostly as another channel to share information with its citizens (Sandoval-Almazan et al., 2012). To better understand the phenomenon, in this section of the paper, we include a description of social media and its use by government, as well as a brief description of theoretical approaches to understand technology-facilitated organizational change. 2.1. Social media and its use by governments The invention of the Internet and the web facilitated the creation of new applications, such as social media, which allowed two-way interactions between organizations and individuals. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as “a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (p. 61). Organizations of all types can take advantage of social media to interact with their constituencies. In the case of governments, social media is a very important tool to keep their constituents informed and to hear their voice (Mossberger et al., 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013; Tobias, 2011; Zheng & Zheng, 2014). However, given the market-driven nature of social media applications, they are also an important source of risk and uncertainty for government organizations, which usually have highly hierarchical communication practices (Bughin, Chui, & Manyika,

2012; Mergel, 2013b; Picazo-Vela, Gutiérrez-Martínez, & Luna-Reyes, 2012). Governments of different countries are trying to use social media, and they have been trying to find the best approach to deploy it. Current research suggests that the adoption process started with informal experimentation by early adopters inside the government, followed by the definition of standards and protocols to use social media, which in some cases lead to institutional changes in the government (Mergel & Bretschneider, 2013). As a result, governments and research centers have created guidelines to get the most benefits and to reduce the possibility of failure of their social media initiatives (e.g., CIO Council, 2009; Government of Canada, 2011; Hrdinová, Helbig, & Peters, 2010). The main promise of social media is increased citizen participation (Mossberger et al., 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013). Research, on the other hand, has identified three different modes of interaction with citizens when using social media: representation (one-way pushing information), engagement (citizen pulls in a two-way conversation), and networking (multi-sided conversation) (Mergel, 2013a). Although many success stories have emerged about how social media promotes engagement and positioning of ideas, especially in political campaigns (Robertson, Douglas, Maruyama, & Chen, 2012), the results are frequently uneven, and empirical studies also suggest that the most common way of interaction is the push mode (Mossberger et al., 2013; Reddick & Norris, 2013; Zavattaro et al., 2015). Moreover, some of these empirical accounts call for qualitative studies to better understand factors of success (Reddick & Norris, 2013). Some more recent research has focused on exploring individual characteristics of social media messages and their ability to promote citizen engagement. Common results of these explorations suggest that messages, including pictures and photographs, are the most engaging or promote higher citizen response in form of “likes,” “retweets,” or comments (Bonsón et al., 2015; Lev-On & Steinfeld, 2015; Zavattaro et al., 2015). Although the content of the message also has an effect on citizen response, it has been found to be moderated by culture and context (Bonsón et al., 2015). One of the possible arenas of social media use in the government is the area of social marketing, which is a discipline that was born in the 70's when the principles and practices developed to sell products and services started to be applied to sell ideas, attitudes, or behaviors (Kotler & Lee, 2008). Because of their value as preventive policy, governments have adopted social marketing programs to change attitudes and behaviors in areas such as public services (city cleaning) or public health (Fernandez-Haddad, 2011). Social media has also been recognized as a set of technologies with the potential to augment public health communication (Thackeray, Neiger, Smith, & Van Wagenen, 2012). Social marketing is well aligned with digital government as a way to offer information services to the citizens (Reddick & Norris, 2013). However, the use of social media in these departments is in the early adoption stage, and more research is needed to better understand factors of success (Thackeray et al., 2012). The main concerns in the adoption of social media as a social marketing tool are related to privacy and safety of users, which echoes more general concerns of social media use in government (Lau, Gabarrón, Fernández-Luque, & Armayones Ruiz, 2012; Mergel, 2013a). 2.2. Theoretical perspectives to social media Information technologies have been recognized as sources of organizational change since their inception. In their classic paper, Leavitt and Whisler (1958) discussed the effects of information technologies in organizational structures, creating the first example of what has been called technological determinism (Doherty, Coombs, & Loan-Clarke, 2006). The key assumption of technological determinism is that introducing technology will promote changes in organizational characteristics, such as performance, productivity, or even organizational structure (Doherty et al., 2006; Leavitt & Whisler, 1958). On the other hand,

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

technology implementations have been conceptualized as the result of a shared understanding of purposes and uses of information technologies (Mumford, 2000, 2004; Suchman, 2002). From this perspective, information technologies are socially constructed, and in a sense, technical features are the result of organizational practices and social characteristics. This social determinism is thus a natural response to technological determinism. Both approaches make intense use of factor studies in an attempt to understand directional relationships between technology and social characteristics or vice-versa (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Several researchers have proposed ways to reconcile these competing perspectives to explain the role of information technologies in organizational change (e.g., DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Fountain, 2001; King & Kraemer, 2006; Luna-Reyes, Zhang, Ramón Gil-García, & Cresswell, 2005; Orlikowski, 1992; Walsham & Han, 1991). Some of these perspectives include adaptive structuration theory, social informatics, the structurational model of technology, the socio-technical systems conceptualization, and the technology enactment framework (Gil-Garcia, 2012). These “ensemble views” of information technology consider both effects and “duality” in technology (Orlikowski, 1992). That is to say, the use of information technologies shape and constrain organizational practices and structures, but they also have an effect on technology design. Although much evidence supports the ways in which different organizations interpret technologies, facilitating different enactments of technology, the ways in which technology characteristics intervene in such enactments are unclear (Doherty et al., 2006). In fact, a criticism to all these “ensemble views” concerns the fact that the technology artifact tends to disappear from the analysis (Doherty et al., 2006; Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001). Most of these perspectives prefer a process approach to understand information technology use in organizations (Luna-Reyes et al., 2005; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). A different approach to reconcile both views has been called practice approach or sociomateriality (Kallinikos et al., 2013; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). From this perspective, there are no boundaries among technology, individuals, and organizations. Technology, instead of a tool, constitutes of activities and identities making the material and the social inseparable in “sociomaterial assemblages” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). As Kallinikos et al. (2013) pointed out, digital artifacts are intentionally incomplete and perpetually in the making, they are editable, interactive, open, and distributed. In this way, people and things only exist in relation to each other and emerge temporally in practice (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Social media such as Twitter and Facebook meet both criteria perfectly. First, they are digital artifacts in the sense that they are objects yet lack stability (Kallinikos et al., 2013). Additionally, each social media takes a particular character together with the community of individuals and organizations that use it in their practice. Take, for example, Facebook and LinkedIn, although both of them have many similarities in terms of functionality, they have taken a very different character in practice, and such character is inseparable from the communities that use each of these social media sites. Such practice approaches have proven useful in many different areas, such as information systems development (Luna-Reyes et al., 2005; Orlikowski, 2000), technological design (Bechky, 2003; Black, Carlile, & Repenning, 2004; Suchman, 2002), or distributed computing (Star, 1989). Practice-oriented approaches and the concept of sociomateriality may be useful to theorize about social media use in government because they allow understanding the ways in which local innovations contribute to the emergence of digital artifacts (Suchman, 2002). Moreover, the practice perspective can also be characterized as the “dual and paradoxical nature of organizations and structures” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). This duality recognizes that technologies do not have predefined structures of their own, and they can only be described in terms of a local practice. To illustrate this, Star and Ruhleder (1996) wrote, “a tool is not just a thing with pre-given attributes frozen in time—but a thing becomes a tool in practice, for someone, when connected with some particular activity” (p.112). This way of thinking applied to social media and other technologies implies that they cannot

3

be described as they are, but only as they are instantiated in practice (Orlikowski, 2000). One of the preferred theories underlying practice approaches is Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Cordella & Hesse, 2015; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). ANT has been described by its proposers as a “negative theory” on how to study things in the sense that it does not look for categories, themes, or variables and its causal relationships (Latour, 2004). From this perspective, theories are in the descriptions and reflections of actors. The theory is relevant for the study of sociomateriality and practice, given that it recognizes the existence of heterogeneous networks where no one has special explanatory status (Tatnall, 2005). The main objective is to trace transformation as it happens in practice. Moreover, it has been used to describe electronic government strategy “in the making” as a result of the interactions between technologies and various stakeholders (Cordella & Hesse, 2015). In this sense, the use of the theory in electronic government phenomena suggests that most electronic government strategies are mostly the result of emergent processes. In the following sections, we describe the example of Puebla Sana, attempting to trace the transformation of its social media strategy because of the influence of several actors and stakeholders in social media as well as the sociomaterial characteristics of each of the social media used in the program. 3. Methods The research reported in this paper follows a case study approach (Stake, 1995; Yin, 1994). The case study approach focuses on current events, typically to answer questions of how and why, like the ones that we address in this paper (Yin, 1994). The case study selected for this research is a social marketing program named Puebla Sana, which was adopted by the State of Puebla in Mexico as a component of a wider policy to improve public health. The program started in the first half of 2011 using multiple delivery channels, traditional media, below the line strategies, and of course, social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The case of Puebla Sana was selected because initial observations of the social media component of the Puebla Sana program showed different patterns of interaction in the Facebook and Twitter components of the program, providing an opportunity to explore the sociomateriality of social media in the government (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 6 participants in the project to gather the data. Program reports and presentations were distributed to describe the scope and objectives of the Puebla Sana program. The interviewees included all main actors involved in the delivery of the program, including consultants and personnel from the Ministry of Health in charge of Health Promotion and Communications. Interviews, which lasted about 1 and half hour each, took place during the Months of September, October and November of 2012.The research team took notes and tape-recorded each of the interviews, discussing and analyzing the main themes that emerged from the conversations. At least two members of the team attended each interview. Audio recordings were used, as needed, to support researchers' notes during the analysis. The interview protocol included 12 main questions (with 4–5 probes to each main question) regarding the main strategy of Puebla Sana as well as the specific strategies used in social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. The questions were also designed to discuss the main influences of organizational, institutional, and technical factors on the social media strategy of the program. 4. Puebla Sana: a social marketing program In 1986, the World Health Organization organized the First International Conference on Health Promotion. One of the key products of this first meeting in Ottawa, Canada, was the Charter for Health Promotion, a joint declaration to achieve health for all. The charter motivated the

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

4

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

countries around the world started to design health policies, including health promotion. The main goal of health promotion is to give people more control over their own health with education and other preventive programs. According to one of the interviewees, although Mexico has started some activities to promote public health following this international agreement, the first holistic Health Promotion program in Mexico was not designed until year 2005 in Mexico City. Puebla Sana is the first holistic program for health promotion in the State of Puebla in Mexico, which started in 2011. The program includes design features of a social marketing program in which ideas and habits are being “sold” to the public as a preventive measure to give them more control over their own health. The Puebla Sana program is the flagship program of the Ministry of Health in the State of Puebla, Mexico. The program is the result of the strategic planning process that took place as part of the transition process between Governors. This transition process regularly involves changing the Minister as well as the Regional Directors of the Ministry in the State, which usually generates tensions and discrepancies between the union and physicians working in the State system, especially between the personnel recruited by the new administration and longstanding employees. As a result, the strategic plan involved three main areas of work: internal communication, public relationships, and of course, health promotion. The program had several components involving the re-design of the Ministry's Mission statement, the creation of a graphic identity, training of field personnel and change leaders, a newsletter, and an internal TV program. One of the interviewees described Puebla Sana as a strategy to differentiate the Health Ministry from other State Ministries, achieving a leadership position in promoting State Development and well-being for State inhabitants. Program design involved an assessment of Public Health as well as main capabilities and resources inside the ministry. The ministry hired local consultants who had previously worked with the City Government in programs to improve the city cleanliness and to help them both in the assessment and the design of the new program. Because of the initial assessment, participants in the program found a lack of strategic focus in the area of health promotion. Field workers had to cover about 100 different themes to educate the public in sessions about other public support programs or in Health Fairs around the State. Additionally, the initial assessment showed that the materials used by field workers were outdated and inappropriate to be used with the main target audiences. In this way, although field workers invested many efforts into health promotion, there was little or no evidence of improvements in the State's Public Health indicators. To improve program focus and, as a consequence, to improve program the effect on public health, participants in program design decided to identify the most important public health problems and design contents addressing these specific problems. The data from the assessment showed that chronic non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular diseases were the top causes of death in the State. Other important problems in the state included women health and other problems related to gender violence as well as health and sexual education for teenagers. Finally, the public health assessment has shown to provide an important opportunity to tackle specific campaigns to seasonal diseases, such as cold and flu during the winter and stomach-related disorders during the Spring, when high temperatures and bad water sanitation or wrong food storage practices promote many different kinds of food poisoning and bacterial infections. In this way, Puebla Sana was designed to have an effect on (1) a main program for the public focusing on eating and exercising habits, (2) a component specific to women or Mujeres Sanas, (3) a component for teenagers, and (4) a series of temporal campaigns to prevent seasonal diseases. Participants in the program narrowed down the educational contents managed by field workers and developed several popular games (similar to bingo) with educational content and other materials to support fieldwork.

Social media was conceptualized as a strategy to reach younger audiences through messages and contents of the Puebla Sana program. Initially, the strategy involved the use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Later, a blog was incorporated into the strategy. The strategy became especially significant for the state because of the interest of the Minister in social media. Some of the interviewees explained that, although the minister was not very much engaged in social media at the beginning of his term, increased eruptions on a local volcano made the governor force all ministers to increase their participation in social media –specially Twitter—to keep themselves in touch with the state population. As a result, the minister was caught by the power of these media, staying in touch with different constituencies and stakeholders. In the following sections, we will briefly describe the strategy that specific social media used to support the program. We can describe the program as a learning process in practice for all participants in the Ministry and consultants participating in Puebla Sana. 4.1. Puebla Sana on twitter Twitter is the Minister preferred social media application. In fact, two different Twitter accounts are related to the Puebla Sana program, the minister account and the Puebla Sana account (see Fig. 1). The interviewees described Twitter as a “Red Circle,” referring to the fact that conversations on Twitter are believed to involve mainly local leaders, journalists, and other government actors. One of the participants in the project said, “[Twitter] it is just ourselves.” Although the Puebla Sana Twitter account had 3940 followers by the end of January 2013, only few of them participate in health-related conversations. According to the members of the communications department at the Ministry, the main purpose of the communication strategy is to align the message with the Ministry's agenda, both of them looking for a better Public Health. The main idea is to have health specialists create key content messages, which are to be translated by the people from the communications department into short messages and infographics, which are self-explanatory messages or visual explanations of contents. Communication experts also present the questions from the public to the content experts to get appropriate answers. The Puebla Sana Twitter page was created at the beginning of the program in March 2012. To gather followers, the consultants in charge of the page followed what they described as a snowball approach. Given that the strategy was mainly directed to young audiences, they started following universities and leading journalists in the city. As a result, the page got 600 new followers in the first month, 1000 by the end of May 2012, and almost 4000 by the end of January 2013. At the beginning, the communication strategy was quite aggressive, with one tweet every half hour. The messages addressed various activities in the Minister's agenda along with Puebla Sana key message on healthy eating and exercising habits. The Minister's interest in the Twitter account added an extra pressure on the team to make themselves visible. The coordination for content-creation was not easy at the beginning, and the mix of messages was dominated by news from public actions involving the governor and the minister of health. In many instances, the person in charge of the Twitter account –a consultant working in a remote site—felt alone in the creation of contents. She perceived little support from content experts. Content experts did not expect the new workload, and their daily responsibilities made it difficult for them to be responsive enough to content creation and questions from followers. According to the participants in the program, the followers did not perceive well the mix of messages, and they lost many of them because they perceived Twitter page simply as a way to promote a political image rather than public health. In fact, the most appreciated messages health related, or at least they appeared to be the most appreciated in terms of the number of retweets (RT). Difficulties in making the Twitter account visible in these initial stages motivated participants to change strategy. They recognized the

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

5

Fig. 1. Puebla Sana Twitter page.

difficulty of creating their own topic trends, and as a result, they changed the process of creating contents. By early 2013, people in the communications department were monitoring important Public-Health events and world campaigns to contribute to them. As one of the interviewees commented, “it was very hard to create our own wave, and we decided to join the world's wave.” For example, the snapshot of the Twitter page included in Fig. 1 was taken on February 5, just one day after the World Cancer Day. The picture shows contents and information related to early cancer detection and alternatives to get access to them through the public health system. Once one of the waves was detected, content experts were asked to create specific messages for the public, which were translated by the communications department into short texts, blog entries, or infographics and included in the different social media sites. The communications group also received better response from its content counterparts because it was focusing on themes that were relevant at that moment. The strategy was supported by a blog that contained more permanent content and other media, such as Facebook or YouTube. In a sense, the new strategy reduced the need to create new content by the hour through tweets that refer the audience to the more permanent content in YouTube and the blog. Another important change in the strategy involved the co-location of the consultant inside the ministry communications offices. In this way, the consultant was closer to content creators and other internal staff, getting a much better response and coordination. By mid-2013, the mix of the tweets, comprising mainly content-related messages, and the frequency had changed, as the consultant tweeted about every hour or two. However, given that the tweets were then supporting world topic trends, they got much more RTs from government officials,

journalists, and other opinion leaders who were usually sensitive to these world trends.

4.2. Puebla Sana on Facebook The Puebla Sana Facebook page has a quite different story. Program participants also created a personal profile Facebook page for Puebla Sana at the beginning of the program in March 2012 (Fig. 2a). The beginnings of the page were quite successful, going from zero to 1649 friends in the first 3 months. According to the participants in the project, the communication strategy in Facebook had to be different compared to the strategy in Twitter. Some key differences identified by the team in the initial stages included, for instance, that Facebook offered much more alternatives to deliver content compared to the 144 characters in a Twitter message. Additionally, Facebook offered the possibility of including interactive infographics, which were perceived as having more effect on the intended audience. However, the perception of the account manager was that Facebook friends were less tolerant of political messages compared to Twitter followers. She also believed that this tolerance was even more reduced by the intense political use of Facebook during the presidential campaign in 2012. Her perception, confirmed by some informal exchanges with some of the friends “defriending” Puebla Sana, was that they wanted more content-related postings and less frequent delivery of the messages. In this way, she focused on adding 3 or 4 content-related posts on the page per day. Similar to the case of Twitter, it was difficult to get new content from the content experts, and it was also difficult to attract the attention of friends through likes or follow-up comments.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

6

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Fig. 2. Puebla Sana Facebook pages.

One interesting difference between the Facebook page and the Twitter page was that the field workers, who became friends of Puebla Sana, strongly embraced the Facebook page and started sharing pictures and news from their activities across the State. In this way, the 3–4 content-related messages per day were multiplied by the many pictures of Health Fairs, workshops, and other actions in the field. Facebook became an important form of communication among field workers and even between the central office of Health Promotion and community workers. The manager of the office explained that sometimes, it was

easier for her to get in touch with field workers through the Facebook page rather than by phone or email. In a sense, field workers took over the page, started using it, and kept using it to share their activities and ideas through the mid-2013. Fig. 3a shows the kind of contents that field workers shared on the Facebook personal profile page for Puebla Sana, showing a couple of pictures with people in a Health Fair and the banner of the first of them in 2013. Community field workers' activity in the Facebook page prevented it to grow to other audiences who were interested more in health-related content

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

7

Fig. 3. Contents in the (a) Puebla Sana profile and (b) Puebla Sana fan page.

rather than in news involving work in the field. For a while, program managers decided to moderate Facebook postings to manage the traffic of news. However, on September 2012, they decided to create

a Puebla Sana fan page instead (see Fig. 2b). As of mid-2013, the personal profile page for Puebla Sana had 518 friends with a low level of activity.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

8

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

The Puebla Sana fan page included mainly health-related information. The number of postings per day was about 6 on average, most of them included infographics or links to short articles posted in the Puebla Sana blog. Less than 10% of the postings referred to activities of the Minister of Health in the State. Following a strategy similar to the Twitter page, the main contents of the Facebook fan page are linked to current world trends. Fig. 3b shows, for example, infographics posted on the fan page related to the World Cancer Day. Facebook fans are very active, Liking the postings on the page, and some postings had about 250 “likes.” Commenting on the postings was not that common though, and the most typical interaction involved questions about where to get a service that was being promoted or questioning some of the information posted. Puebla Sana did not provide enough answers to these questions. The fan page had gathered 20,802 “likes” by February 5, 2013, with a growing number of “people talking about this”, specifically, about 5684 people in the week of January 27, 2013. 4.3. Puebla Sana on YouTube Maybe one of the least fortunate components of the Puebla Sana social media strategy was the YouTube channel (Fig. 4). The channel was created also in March 2012, and according to one of the participants, it lacked content. Ten videos were produced and uploaded at the beginning of the program in March 2012. However, according to Mexican regulations, all government-generated content that can be interpreted as campaigning in favor of a specific political party has to be removed from official communication channels. In this way, five of the ten initial videos had to be removed from the channel during the presidential elections in 2012. The channel had no new content added during the presidential elections. Participants in the program saw the YouTube channel as an area of opportunity not fully exploited. The cost of producing video capsules with health content was much higher and required more intense collaboration between the Communications department and content experts. By mid-2013, the channel contained 59 videos, but only

few including health-related content. Most constituted small capsules of the minister's public activities. 4.4. Puebla Sana blog Finally, starting September 2012, the social media strategy of Puebla Sana also included a blog (Fig. 5). The blog was a mix of health promotion contents as well as news and activities in the Minister agenda. According to the program managers, the blog worked as a newsletter for the Ministry for Health and as a way to share contents for a longer period compared to a post in Facebook or a tweet. It was common to include a blog entry's web address as a part of many tweets related to the specific topic of that entry. News about the minister of health played a main role in the blog design and more balanced role in terms of content. That is, in terms of design, the main images in the blog usually featured the minister participating in public activities; however, less than half of the blog entries were related to the minister activities. Since its beginning of September 2012 and until January 2013, the blog included 134 entries. Twenty-nine of these entries constituted an archive of infographics generated for the Facebook account. Fifty-six entries were short articles featuring information on preventing cancer or improving eating or exercising habits, and 49 entries were news of public activities in the minister agenda. The number of activities in the blog averaged almost 27 entries per month. None of the entries in the blog had comments from the blog readers. Each of the social media used as a part of the strategy in the Puebla Sana program had specific characteristics. Some of them were part of the original strategy, and some of them deviated from the plan to be more effective to reach the audience and being more effective. These changes are the result of a learning process during the implementation of the strategy. Some other changes reflected interests and activities inside the Facebook or Twitter communities. One of the participants in the program commented during the interview, stating, “We are all learning about social networks and social media, and every day we continue

Fig. 4. Puebla Sana YouTube page.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

9

Fig. 5. Puebla Sana blog.

learning about the ways in which visitors respond to our message.” For example, content creation was originally thought to be aligned with the basic subjects selected to be themes of the different components of the program. However, it resulted to be more effective to follow global trends in order to increase the attention to the message measured in terms of the number of retweets. As one of the interviewees commented, “We have learned that it is much easier to ride on the wave instead of trying to create our own.” Changes in the communication strategy were also related to the nature of the social media platform. For example, some of the interviewees characterized Twitter as a “red circle” reaching mainly other local leaders, journalists, and opinion leaders. Facebook, on the other hand, was characterized as a “community of common interests.” Finally, the blog was understood by the team as a newsletter or archival mechanism through which contents become more permanent over time. Having the message in this archive allow program managers to refer to it several times through Twitter or Facebook. Temporality of the message has been found to differentiate each media. The message could stay on the page of a follower in Twitter only for a few seconds. On Facebook, the message stays on the page for longer, although not as long as in a blog or YouTube. 5. Discussion and conclusions In the previous section, we described the particular social media practices of the Ministry of Health in the State of Puebla, Mexico. Such practices involved the use of Facebook and Twitter to broadcast social marketing messages in a more continuous way, referring to or pointing at what actors perceived as a “more permanent” content hosted in a blog and YouTube. These practices of using social media were evolving. That is to say, actors in the Puebla Sana program did not plan to use social media in the way it has been used, but they modified both content

and frequency of the messages during the implementation of their plan. We argue that the reasons and nature of the local adaptations of the program respond to the sociomateriality of social media (Kallinikos et al., 2013; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). That is to say, Facebook or Twitter cannot be understood by separating the technological and the social components of the system, given that both components define the ways in which the message emerges and changes over time. As Kallinikos et al. (2013) pointed out, messages on Facebook and Twitter are digital artifacts, they are objects, but they are adapted and modified over time. Every time users “like,” “share” or “retweet” the message, they modify and re-create the content of the message according to their own context and practice. In a sense, changes to the specific uses of each platform depend not only on the technological functionalities of each social media platform, but also on the communities of stakeholders participating in each of these platforms. As we will discuss in more detail later in the section, we may argue that the networks and communities that the team in charge of Puebla Sana decided to join as well as the technical characteristics of the platform influenced heavily the final the communication strategies on Facebook and Twitter. The clearest example of the influence of the community on the message in this specific case was observed on Facebook. The field worker community that joined the conversation of Puebla Sana adopted and re-created the message to transform the Facebook page in their own community board to promote their own activities. The case of Twitter is maybe more subtle. However, the perception of this medium as a “red circle” of leaders and the decision to join that specific conversation may have also influenced the nature of the message, paying more attention to the general health events rather than the local ones. The Puebla Sana program constitutes an example of a “technology assemblage” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) where content messages emerge and evolve over time depending on both technology characteristics and

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

10

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

the social rules of communities using these technologies. As it is shown in Fig. 6, the assemblage view implies that platform characteristics and social processes work together in the construction of both the social media community of users and the message. In this sense, government activity in social media is emergent in nature, taking advantage of the government planned strategy as well as platform characteristics and the interests of the user community, which –as it is suggested by the figure—are in turn a function of local and global co-creation of content and external events. Available resources play also an important role in the local creation of content and its characteristics. Creating a video blog, an infographic or a textual blog entry requires much more resources than a tweet. Moreover, different technology platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have different sociomaterial characteristics, as illustrated in the Puebla Sana project. Although both social media platforms have some similarities in functionalities (i.e., sharing short messages with friends or followers), both evolved to be very different assemblages. In the next paragraphs, we are going to discuss some of the differences, as they are reflected in Puebla Sana. Interviewees perceive Facebook as a platform to build community and meet friends and in this sense, social rules on Facebook tolerate less continuous marketing messages but support engagement among the members of the program. Field workers transformed the Puebla Sana page, which was envisioned as a place to share health information, into a site where they share their work, transforming the message that the program was intended to share into their own message, sharing news and updates of actions in the field, and thus making Facebook their tool to share their message in practice (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). The ministry, which adopted the platform as the preferred medium to get in touch with field workers, also exploited the value of Facebook as a platform for communication. In this assemblage, health content was forced out to a different venue, creating the fan page that was used to share the Health Promotion Message. Consistent with previous research, messages that included images and pictures were more engaging compared to messages including only text, capturing more likes or retweets (Bonsón et al., 2015; Lev-On & Steinfeld, 2015). Interviewees, on the other hand, perceive Twitter, as a much faster platform with social rules that appear to push for a much more continuous information sharing. In terms of its use in practice, these rules are

Building a social media community

Platform-wide content characteristics Global events

Trending topics

Local events

Global community influence on local co-creation

Local interests Local users co-creating content

Local content

Local content characteristics

Characteristics of social media users Local emergent activity Local planned strategy Platform characteristics Fig. 6. Social media as a “Technology Assemblage”.

Local resources

reflected partially in the perceived tolerance to the increased frequency of the messages. Technology characteristics of Twitter also play a role in this tolerance, given that messages on Twitter are pushed down as the new messages are posted in the Twitter Feed, making them more difficult to see. On the other hand, the “red circle” in Twitter, and the rules followed by them, made this platform a good way to promote oneself and reach the followers of other members of the circle. However, the speed of the platform makes it difficult to create larger trends, unless you are joining one of the current shared trends among a community. In this way, the Puebla Sana program was again modified to better respond to the sociomateriality of Twitter by joining current trend topics instead of pushing their own, increasing its effect although not necessarily in all original health areas of interest. In a sense, both Twitter and Facebook communities have been transforming the program strategy and the message, taking advantage of the technical functionalities of each platform and keeping the message continuously in the making (Cordella & Hesse, 2015; Kallinikos et al., 2013). The YouTube page and the Puebla Sana blog were much less successful compared to Twitter and Facebook. Participants in the program identified the blog as an archive of longer messages that could be used as a reference for a more continuous thread presented on both Facebook and Twitter. However, if we consider the number of comments in the blog as an indicator of the traffic, we may be able to say that there was not much traffic on this page. Program participants described the YouTube channel as a missed opportunity with lots of potential. We believe that both platforms in this case require a much higher involvement of local resources such as content experts, which the program could not trigger. In this way, the efforts and resources of the communications department were not enough to promote such engagement and a community of content creators. Finally, strategies and designs in the Puebla Sana program responded initially to organizational objectives and institutional frameworks (Fountain, 2001). That is to say, they developed the initial social media pages and policies according to their organizational forms and institutional arrangements. However, the case also offers evidence to suggest that the Puebla Sana team had to adjust its practices to increase the effect of its message, although it conceded to follow the media trends or “wave,” which could or could not correspond to their initial objectives. That is to say, the Puebla Sana message responded to clearly identified health problems of inhabitants in the state, and because of the dynamics of artifact creation of sociomateriality as well as local resources and practices, it turned to topics and concerns recommended by the World Health Organization and other international organizations. Although these topics were also relevant to promote health at Puebla, they were not the originally intended messages. In this way, we believe that the Puebla Sana staff adapted their practices along the way, responding to the constrains imposed by each social media, as suggested previously in the literature (Doherty et al., 2006; Orlikowski, 1992). We found that characteristics of these technology assemblages (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) influence working practices inside the team of people in charge of the promotion of the health programs. One example of this effect was on the co-location of the consultant to be closer to content creators. Therefore, because social media platforms demanded a constant creation of content, the relationship between the content experts and the consultant had to change from a virtual relationship to a closer relationship. However, it seems that blogs and video blogs require a much higher involvement of content creators or more resources in the creation of content to be successful. Although we have presented each social media platform as a technology assemblage, the case suggests that the Puebla Sana team designed a larger assemblage involving a coordinated strategy using all platforms. YouTube and the blog, as more permanent sources of content, could be used and referred to in the more continuous messages on Twitter and Facebook. The message was created according to local practices as well as specific organizational and institutional contexts. However, once the message was first delivered to the media, the

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

assemblage of technologies, communities, and people modified, reduced, or intensified it. In a sense, the message is always “in the making” and becomes inseparable from the social and technical aspects of each media (Cordella & Hesse, 2015; Kallinikos et al., 2013). The characteristics of the message are also related to the type of technology used to create and send it. For example, senders using desktops participate in different ways compared to those participating through mobile devices. The nature of participation also depends on the type of network used by each participating actors (cellular vs. Wi-Fi access). People also interact with the message consistent to their local practices, culture, and organizational contexts. Therefore, any social media strategy should consider the main characteristics of such assemblages in the process of content creation. We can conclude that the sociomateriality of technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, may be conceived as having a life by their own, resulting from the interactions of technical characteristics, users, and local practices. Public managers wanting to use social media as part of their strategies need to learn the rules of using each media, which impose constrains to their intentions, goals, and local resources. The Puebla Sana program has also practical implications. An important implication is that any electronic government strategy is emergent in nature, and just like the messages in social media platforms, it is continuously “in the making” (Cordella & Hesse, 2015; Luna-Reyes et al., 2005). As the Puebla Sana team learned, the emergent component of its strategy resulted from the interactions among communities and stakeholder groups as well as from technical characteristics of each social media platform and its own organizational and institutional resources. More specifically, communities in social media are much more interested in the content and not in other news related to political and public activities of the ministers and leaders. Moreover, public responses on social media, such as Facebook, can get out of control. Social activity among field workers forced the program to move the health message to a new Fan page, instead of the original Profile page. In other words, any social media strategy has to consider the communities and groups that need to be included in the conversation. Although in some of these platforms, you have little or no control over who wants to “follow” your initiative, program managers have control and decision power in terms of whom they want to “follow.” The selection of this network will have an effect on the nature of the message as well as on the level of engagement in the conversation. In this way, the level of engagement in social media does not depend only on adopting a specific communication strategy, as suggested by Mergel (2013b), or on the format of the message as suggested in recent research (i.e. text vs. pictures) (Bonsón et al., 2015; Lev-On & Steinfeld, 2015; Zavattaro et al., 2015), but also on the community with which one chooses to communicate. Furthermore, there are synergies among different social media, and the messages can cross among them, linking Twitter to a blog page or to a video on the YouTube page, with some of them being more volatile (Twitter and Facebook) and others more permanent (Blogs and videoblogs). Managers and other actors in the Puebla Sana program recognized several good practices from their involvement in the program: 1. Fewer words are more. Try to communicate through images when possible. If images are not possible, think about a simple message that follows basic rules of a particular social media. 2. Starting a social media strategy implies joining a conversation within a community. Identify the community or network to work with in the co-creation of content and messages with missions similar to your own program and work actively in creating such network. 3. The content of the message must be adapted to a specific context or reference framework provided by the sociomateriality of each social media platform (i.e., simpler messages for Twitter or more visuals for Facebook). 4. Message sender's role is more modest than in other traditional or electronic media. In fact, the message is going to be modified by

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11

others in the diffusion process. In this context listening to the conversation is as important as initiating new messages. New organizational roles are needed to manage the social media strategy both to generate content and to adapt the emergent strategy. Some social media (such as blogs or video blogs) require more resources to create content as well as higher involvement of content creators to make them more successful. Avoid political campaigning and focus on useful content. Use other relevant sources to create content or to point to interesting content. In this case, they follow closely content in the World Health Organization page. The social media campaign needs to be coordinated with other efforts on radio, TV, and newspapers. Be honest and direct, do not be afraid to criticism, and respond quickly to negative comments or complains.

Additional lessons from the case include the fact that legislation and other political events have an effect on the strategy. In this case, electoral legislations and the presidential campaigns had an effect on the strategy and the ways in which the message was received. Although the Internet facilitates communication and telework, the team has worked much better after the consultant managing all different accounts co-located at the Ministry of Health offices. Seeing a face every day facilitates coordination in content creation and posting. Finally, we understand that our conclusions and discussion are based on a single case study, and generalizability of the results is limited. In this way, more research is needed to advance our understanding of developing electronic government strategies through social media.

References Bechky, B. (2003). Sharing meaning across occupational communities: The transformation of understanding on a production floor. Organization Science, 14(3), 312–330. Black, L. J., Carlile, P. R., & Repenning, N. P. (2004). A dynamic theory of expertise and occupational boundaries in new technology implementation: Building on Barley's study of CT scanning. Administrative Science Quarterly, 49(4), 572–607. Bonsón, E., Torres, L., Royo, S., & Flores, F. (2012). Local e-government 2.0: Social media and corporate transparency in municipalities. Government Information Quarterly, 29(2), 123–132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2011.10.001. Bonsón, E., Royo, S., & Ratkai, M. (2015). Citizens' engagement on local governments' Facebook sites. An empirical analysis: The impact of different media and content types in Western Europe. Government Information Quarterly, 32(1), 52–62. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.11.001. Bughin, J., Chui, M., & Manyika, J. (2012). Capturing business value with social technologies. The McKinsey Quarterly, 4, 72–80. CIO Council (2009). Guidelines for secure use of social media by federal departments and agencies. Retrieved from https://cio.gov/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/09/ Guidelines_for_Secure_Use_Social_Media_v01-0.pdf Cordella, A., & Hesse, J. (2015). E-government in the making: An actor network perspective. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 9(1), 104–125. http://dx. doi.org/10.1108/TG-02-2014-0006. Criado, J. l., Sandoval-Almazan, R., & Gil-Garcia, R. (2013). Government innovation through social media. Government Information Quarterly, 30(4), 319–326. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.10.003. DeSanctis, G., & Poole, M. S. (1994). Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: Adaptive structuration theory. Organization Science, 5(2), 121–147. Doherty, N. F., Coombs, C. R., & Loan-Clarke, J. (2006). A re-conceptualization of the interpretive flexibility of information technologies: Redressing the balance between the social and the technical. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(6), 569–582. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000653. Fernandez-Haddad, M. (2011). Understanding the effectiveness of social marketing programs: Through action research. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing. Fountain, J. (2001). Building the virtual state: Information technology and institutional change. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Gil-Garcia, J. R. (2012). Enacting electronic government success: An integrative study of government-wide websites, organizational capabilities, and institutions (2012th ed.). Springer. Government of Canada (2011). Guideline for external use of web 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=24835§ion=text Hrdinová, J., Helbig, N., & Peters, C. S. (2010, May 12). Designing social media policy for government: Eight essential elements. Center for technology in government. Retrieved from http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/socialmedia? proj=socialmedia&sub=summary Kallinikos, J., Aaltonen, A., & Marton, A. (2013). The ambivalent ontology of digital artifacts. MIS Quarterly, 37(2), 357–370.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004

12

S. Picazo-Vela et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. bushor.2009.09.003. Kavanaugh, A. L., Fox, E. A., Sheetz, S. D., Yang, S., Li, L. T., Shoemaker, D. J., ... Xie, L. (2012). Social media use by government: From the routine to the critical. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 480–491. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. giq.2012.06.002. Kim, S. -T. (2013). Next generation e-government strategies and asks for the smart society-based on Korea's case. Journal of E-Governance, 36(1), 12–24. King, J. L., & Kraemer, K. (2006). Information technology and administrative reform: Will e-government be different? International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 2(1), 1+. Kotler, P., & Lee, N. (2008). Social marketing: Influencing behaviors for good/Philip Kotler, Nancy R. Lee. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, c2008. Latour, B. (2004). On using ANT for studying information systems: A (somewhat) Socratic dialogue. In C. Avgerou, C. Ciborra, & F. Land (Eds.), The social study of information and communication technology: Innovation, actors and contexts. Oxford University Press. Lau, A., Gabarrón, E., Fernández-Luque, L., & Armayones Ruiz, M. (2012). Social media in health. What are the safety concerns for healthcare consumers? [Article]. ), June 1. Retrieved February 15, 2013, from http://openaccess.uoc.edu/webapps/o2/handle/ 10609/14941 Leavitt, H. J., & Whisler, T. L. (1958). Management in the 1980′s. Harvard Business Review, 36(41) Retrieved from http://hbr.org/1958/11/management-in-the-1980s/ar/1 Lev-On, A., & Steinfeld, N. (2015). Local engagement online: Municipal Facebook pages as hubs of interaction. Government Information Quarterly, 32(3), 299–307. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.giq.2015.05.007. Luna-Reyes, L. F., Zhang, J., Ramón Gil-García, J., & Cresswell, A. M. (2005). Information systems development as emergent socio-technical change: A practice approach. European Journal of Information Systems, 14(1), 93–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/ palgrave.ejis.3000524. Mergel, I. (2012). The social media innovation challenge in the public sector. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 17(3/4), 281–292. Mergel, I. (2013a). A framework for interpreting social media interactions in the public sector. Government Information Quarterly, 30(4), 327–334. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.giq.2013.05.015. Mergel, I. (2013b). Social media adoption and resulting tactics in the U.S. federal government. Government Information Quarterly, 30(2), 123–130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. giq.2012.12.004. Mergel, I., & Bretschneider, S. I. (2013). A three-stage adoption process for social media use in government. Public Administration Review, 73(3), 390–400 10.1111/puar. 12021. Mergel, I., Schweik, C. M., & Fountain, J. E. (2009). The transformational effect of web 2.0 technologies on government (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 1412796). Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract= 1412796 Mossberger, K., Wu, Y., & Crawford, J. (2013). Connecting citizens and local governments? Social media and interactivity in major U.S. cities. Government Information Quarterly, 30(4), 351–358. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.05.016. Mumford, E. (2000). A socio-technical approach to systems design. Requirements Engineering, 5(2), 125–133. Mumford, E. (2004). Designing human systems: The ethics method (Vol. 2004). Nah, S., & Saxton, G. D. (2013). Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations. New Media & Society, 15(2), 294–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 1461444812452411. Orlikowski, W. (1992). The duality of technology: Rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organization Science, 3(3), 398–427. Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11(4), 404–428.

Orlikowski, W., & Iacono, S. (2001). Research commentary: Desperately seeking the “IT” in IT research — A call to theorizing the IT artifact. Information Systems Research, 12(2), 121–134. Orlikowski, W. J., & Scott, S. V. (2008). Chapter 10: Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 433–474. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19416520802211644. Picazo-Vela, S., Gutiérrez-Martínez, I., & Luna-Reyes, L. F. (2012). Understanding risks, benefits, and strategic alternatives of social media applications in the public sector. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 504–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq. 2012.07.002. Reddick, C. G., & Norris, D. F. (2013). Social media adoption at the American grass roots: Web 2.0 or 1.5? Government Information Quarterly, 30(4), 498–507. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.05.011. Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., Maruyama, M., & Chen, L. -W. (2012). Political dialog evolution in a social network. Proceedings of the 13th annual international conference on digital government research (pp. 40–48). New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1145/2307729.2307737. Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., Maruyama, M., & Semaan, B. (2013). Political discourse on social networking sites: Sentiment, in-group/out-group orientation and rationality. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 18(2), 107–126 10.3233/IP-130303. Sandoval-Almazan, R., & Ramon Gil-Garcia, J. (2014). Towards cyberactivism 2.0? Understanding the use of social media and other information technologies for political activism and social movements. Government Information Quarterly, 31(3), 365–378. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2013.10.016. Sandoval-Almazán, R., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Luna, D. E., Luna-Reyes, L. F., & Diaz-Murillo, G. (2011). The use of web 2.0 on Mexican state websites: A three-year assessment. Electronic Journal of E-Government, 9(2) Retrieved from http://www.ejeg.com/ volume9/issue2 Sandoval-Almazan, R., Nava-Rogel, R. M., & Gómez-Díaz, M. R. (2012). Facebook & Twitter in public administration: The case of Mexican local governments. pp 193–22 Berlin: Presented at the IADIS International Conference e-Society. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Star, S. L. (1989). The structure of Ill-structured solutions: Boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In L. Gasser, N. Huhns, & Michael (Eds.), Distributed artificial intelligence. II. (pp. 37–54). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. Suchman, L. (2002). Practice-based design of information systems: Notes from the hyperdeveloped world. The Information Society, 18(2), 139–144. Tatnall, A. (2005). Actor-network theory in information systems research. In M. KhosrowPour (Ed.), Encyclopedia of information science and technology (pp. 42–46). Hershey PA: IGI Global Retrieved from http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/encyclopediainformation-science-technology/14208#table-of-contents Thackeray, R., Neiger, B. L., Smith, A. K., & Van Wagenen, S. B. (2012). Adoption and use of social media among public health departments. BMC Public Health, 12, 242. Tobias, E. (2011). Using twitter and other social media platforms to provide situational awareness during an incident. Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, 5(3), 208–223. Walsham, G., & Han, C. -K. (1991). Structuration theory and information systems research. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 17, 77–85. Yin, R. K. (1994). Case study research design and methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Zavattaro, S. M., French, P. E., & Mohanty, S. D. (2015). A sentiment analysis of U.S. local government tweets: The connection between tone and citizen involvement. Government Information Quarterly, 32(3), 333–341. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq. 2015.03.003. Zheng, L., & Zheng, T. (2014). Innovation through social media in the public sector: Information and interactions. Government Information Quarterly, 31(Supplement 1), S106–S117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.01.011.

Please cite this article as: Picazo-Vela, S., et al., Opening the black box: Developing strategies to use social media in government, Government Information Quarterly (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.08.004