Building Holistic Evidence for Social Media Impact

• Author: Ines Mergel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12780
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017

Building Holistic Evidence for Social Media Impact 489

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 4, pp. 489–495. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12780.

Ines Mergel is full professor of public

administration in the Department of Politics

and Public Administration at the University

of Konstanz in Germany. Her research

focuses on digital transformation in the

public sector.

E-mail: ines.mergel@uni-konstanz.de

Evidence in Public

Administration

Abstract : Social media measurement is important for understanding an organization ’ s reach and engagement with

its audiences. In response to Warren Kagarise and Staci M. Zavattaro ’ s question about what works in social media

measurement, this article discusses how public administration researchers and practitioners are using social media data

that they can easily collect from social media platforms and contrasts these practices with data measurement efforts that

can provide deeper insights for evidence-based decision making. This evidence includes interactivity and connectivity

among citizens, attributes of network actors, and network structures and positions to understand how content travels

through the network and who are the influential actors.

Kimberley R. Isett, Brian W. Head, and Gary VanLandingham , Editors

Ines Mergel

University of Konstanz, Germany

Building Holistic Evidence for Social Media Impact

O rganizations are using free analytics provided

by social media platform providers, such as the

number of followers and the number of times

a post was seen, as an indicator of the quality of and

interest in a topic. Others use the number of times an

update was shared as a proxy for reach and engagement,

as presented in this issue of Public Administration

Review by Warren Kagarise and Staci Zavattaro in their

case study of the City of Issaquah, Washington (“Social

Media: How One City Opens the Evidence Black

Box”). Scholars use the same publicly available measures

to make inferences about degrees of participation,

transparency, or even democratization and legitimacy

of government (see, e.g., Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer

2015 ). What current practices neglect are measures

that can be derived from the characteristics of the social

networking platforms and the types of interactions that

citizens have among themselves and with the social

media content. These measures use dyadic relationships

between actors, their degree of interactivity, and

the resulting structures and positions, which can be

analyzed to draw conclusions about the segmentation of

stakeholders or the quality of content shared on social

media sites. Lastly, what is missing in current practices

and conversations about social media measurement

and its impact is the link to organizational mission

and potential innovative outcomes of the knowledge

gained using analysis and interpretation. As Isett, Head,

and VanLandingham ( 2016 ) suggest, additional data

collection and analytical approaches are needed to

provide evidence for decision making.

In response to Kagarise and Zavattaro ’ s measurement

approach, this article discusses how current social

media measurement techniques are represented in the

public administration and government technology

literature, describes how scholars use publicly available

social media data sources, and derives a series of open

research questions for public administration scholars

and practitioners that are not answered by the current

use of social media data.

The State of Social Media Measurement in

the Public Sector

Kagarise and Zavattaro provide two measures of

social media impact: breadth and depth of citizen

engagement with the city ’ s social media content. First,

they measure breadth as an indicator of the increase

in organizational awareness among constituents.

They use indicators such as the number of followers,

number of page views, and number of organizational

mentions. Second, the city uses three measures of

depth. It measures the depth of follower engagement

by counting how often citizens visit, comment, reply

to, or add content to the city ’ s social media accounts.

Issaquah then measures depth, called “word-of-

mouse” engagement, by tracking the number of times

city content is shared or tagged or dialogue evolves as

a result of a social media post. These measures overlap

with the breadth indicators, and it is unclear how the

city distinguishes between page views and visits, which

are used in both measures. Finally, the city measures

depth as an indicator of sentiment with a deep dive

into the content of the posts. A form of sentiment

analysis is used to indicate whether citizens adopt

a positive tone by counting the use of exclamation

points, emoji, and photos shared.

The data that Issaquah uses are freely available on

social media sites, which are third-party platforms that