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Social Media for Government Services: A Case Study of Human Services

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Abstract

The Australian Government Department of Human Services has been using social media since 2009 to support its customers and improve service delivery. It has done so in a number of ways: by monitoring social media to listen to citizens, establishing Facebook and Twitter accounts to engage with the public, and creating online communities. In this chapter, we present how we have been using social media, some success stories together with the challenges we had to face. We also briefly describe our governance framework and how we might measure success.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.humanservices.gov.au/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/medicare.

  3. 3.

    http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/centrelink.

  4. 4.

    http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/child-support.

  5. 5.

    Australian Government Department of Human Services Annual Report 2013–14.

  6. 6.

    https://www.google.com.au/alerts.

  7. 7.

    http://www.socialmention.com/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.sensis.com.au/about/our-reports/sensis-social-media-report.

  9. 9.

    http://thegreynomads.com.au/.

  10. 10.

    Overclocking is the process of forcing a computer or hardware component to operate faster than the manufacturer-specified clock frequency. Source Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking.

  11. 11.

    http://whirlpool.net.au/.

  12. 12.

    TAFE is a vocational education and training provider in Australia.

  13. 13.

    www.humanservices.gov.au/socialmedia.

  14. 14.

    Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situation. This effect is prominent in ambiguous social situations where people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behaviour, and is driven by the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof.

  15. 15.

    http://www.humanservices.gov.au/mobileoffice.

References

  1. Department of Human Services (2015). How we use social media. http://www.humanservices.gov.au/corporate/publications-and-resources/social-media/how-we-use-social-media. Accessed on September 11, 2015.

  2. Department of Human Services (2015). Policies on our social media accounts. http://www.humanservices.gov.au/corporate/publications-and-resources/social-media/policies-on-our-social-media-accounts. Accessed on September 11, 2015.

  3. CSIRO (2015). Transforming Human Services for the Digital Era. https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP149489&dsid=DS2. Accessed on September 11, 2015.

  4. Wan, S., & Paris, C. (2014) Improving government services with social media feedback. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 27–36).

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  5. State Government Victoria (2015). Victorian Floods 2010–11 Recovery Progress Report. http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/678188/9426DHH-Report_WEB.pdf. Accessed on September 11, 2015.

  6. Bista, S. K., Colineau, N., Nepal, S., & Paris, C. (2013). Next step: an online community to support parents in their transition to work. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion (pp. 5–10).

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  7. Bista, S. K., Colineau, N., Nepal, S., & Paris, C. (2012). The design of an online community for welfare recipients. In Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (pp. 38–41).

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  8. Bista, S. K., Nepal, S., & Paris, C. (2013). Know your members’ trust. In UMAP Workshops.

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  9. Paris, C., Colineau, N., Nepal, S., Bista, S. K., & Beschorner, G. (2013). Ethical considerations in an online community: The balancing act. Ethics and Information Technology, 15(4), 301–316.

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  10. Colineau, N. (2012). A buddy matching program to help build an online support network. In Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (pp. 85–88).

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  11. Bista, S. K., Nepal, S., Colineau, N., & Paris, C. (2012). Using gamification in an online community. In 8th International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom) (pp. 611–618).

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  12. Colineau, N., Paris, C., & Dennett, A. (2011). Capitalising on the potential of online communities to help welfare recipients. In The Government and Citizen Engagement Workshop, in Conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2011), June 29–July 2, 2011, Brisbane, Australia. (Proceedings published in the International Reports on Socio-Informatics).

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  13. Colineau, N., Paris, C., & Dennett, A. (2011). Exploring the use of an online community in welfare transition programs. In The Proceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI 2011)—Extended Abstract, July 4–8, 2011. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.

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  14. Nielsen Norman Group (2015). http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/. Accessed September 14, 2015.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Services, Canberra, Australia

    Gina Ciancio & Amanda Dennett

Authors
  1. Gina Ciancio
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  2. Amanda Dennett
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amanda Dennett .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Data61, Marsfield, New South Wales, Australia

    Surya Nepal

  2. Services Flagship, CSIRO Data61, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Cécile Paris

  3. RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Dimitrios Georgakopoulos

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Ciancio, G., Dennett, A. (2015). Social Media for Government Services: A Case Study of Human Services. In: Nepal, S., Paris, C., Georgakopoulos, D. (eds) Social Media for Government Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27235-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27237-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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