Content area
Local municipalities websites and their social network sites are important mediators for residents and visitors desiring to relate with municipalities' local announcement, building and entities, services, sportive and cultural activities, touristic facilities, etc. It has been already known that rapidly emerging digital platforms such as websites, social network sites represent powerful engagement tools. The main question is; could municipalities use these powerful tools to serve much better or not? The purpose of this study is to investigate how municipalities present themselves on digital platforms. In this context, websites and social network sites accounts of 30 local municipalities of İzmir and İzmir metropolitan municipality are examined. Our findings show that most of local municipalities have efficient and effective websites in some aspects. However most of them have some significant deficiencies such as different language support, broken links, etc. Municipalities use social network sites especially Twitter to enhance transparency and transmission but, they need to extend to other sites too.
ABSTRACT
Local municipalities websites and their social network sites are important mediators for residents and visitors desiring to relate with municipalities' local announcement, building and entities, services, sportive and cultural activities, touristic facilities, etc. It has been already known that rapidly emerging digital platforms such as websites, social network sites represent powerful engagement tools. The main question is; could municipalities use these powerful tools to serve much better or not? The purpose of this study is to investigate how municipalities present themselves on digital platforms. In this context, websites and social network sites accounts of 30 local municipalities of İzmir and İzmir metropolitan municipality are examined. Our findings show that most of local municipalities have efficient and effective websites in some aspects. However most of them have some significant deficiencies such as different language support, broken links, etc. Municipalities use social network sites especially Twitter to enhance transparency and transmission but, they need to extend to other sites too.
Keywords: Website, Social Media, İzmir Metropolitan Municipality, Local Municipalities
1. INTRODUCTION
Local governments are the closest units to the public and are administrative units that can personally communicate with the public. Though the management structure of local governments varies from country to country, the characteristic of being a local unit serving to the public is common. The ability of serving in accordance with public demands and needs has a particular importance in terms of the relationship between local governments and public. Providing permanency of local services to the public is one of the main duties of the state. For this reason, public relations aspect of the state has gradually expanded and altered. Looking at the activities of municipality in relation to the public, two dimensions are concerned. The first one is the "recognition" that the municipalities use to determine the structure and opinions of the people; and the second is to "promote" the services that the municipalities are offering. Developments in information and communication technologies have eased the connection between local governments and people, thus have provided them to get closer. Carrying out the services and duties for which local governments are responsible an d citizens' duties and services to the state have gained importance in the sense of being fast, economic, uninterrupted and secure electronically. Another effect of information and communication technologies is being able to ensure the flow of information between the local government unit and other institutions (Kocaoğlu, Emini, 2013, p. 26). The internet puts at the disposal of the public sector, as well as the local administration, a powerful channel of communication that contributes to the establishment of a dialogue between the administration and the public (Gandia & Archidona, 2007, p. 36) Corporate web pages have allowed municipalities to promote their own services and make people use of municipal services. In recent years, the use of social media tools such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube has become widespread among both administrative organisations and citizens. Public administrations are increasingly adopting social media, such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube to interact with citizens (Agostino, 2013, p. 232) Social media has created an effective communication channel between the municipalities and the citizens in terms of the services the municipalities are offering. In particular, the use of mayors' social media accounts allows citizens to interact with both the president and the institution. The aim of the study is to show how municipalities represent themselves in the digital platform. For this aim, web sites and social network sites accounts of Izmir Metropolitan Municipality and 30 district municipalities were examined.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
In recent years, many governments, in an effort to improve service delivery and increase transparency and accountability, have begun to utilize information technologies (Manoharan, et al., 2015, p. 116) . The revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT) has been changing not only the daily lives of people but also the interactions between governments and citizens (Chun, et al., 2010, p. 1). Developments achieved in ICT can help public enterprises to contact easily with their audience and impove long term relationships. Besides, since the middle of the 1990s, the internet has been carrying out for everyone a fundamental role in the access, dissemination and communication of information and knowledge. The internet puts at the disposal of the public sector, as well as the local administration, a powerful channel of communication that contributes to the establishment of a dialogue between the administration and the public (Gandia & Archidona, 2007, p. 35-36) Thanks to the developments in technology, governments have initiated and developed institutional websites for public administration purposes (Karkin & Janssen, 2014, p. 351). In the rising communication environment, selecting effective communication channels, managing the channel and creating the targeted outputs grow in importance. Government agencies should disclose information about their operations and decisions rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Participation encourages the public engagement by increasing opportunities for the public to participate in policymaking and to provide the government with the collective knowledge, ideas, and expertise of the citizens (Chun, et al., 2010, p.2). Web technologies also facilitate government's linkages with citizens, other governmental units, and businesses (Moon, 2002, p. 425). As a far-reaching information tool, websites enables municipalities to inform public comperensively and real-time. They can present information about services that serves, communication alternatives, electronic tools which help citizens in invoice payments, applications for complaints and suggestions, reading recent news and following upcoming social and cultural activies, etc. The Internet and the World Wide Web offer two main capabilities that can further local governance reform (Ambramson, et al., 1988; Bimber, 1996; Raab, et al., 1996). First, cities may distribute and citizens may receive upto-date information concerning municipal affairs cheaply and conveniently. Internet-based information distribution can dramatically improve citizen and business knowledge of municipal affairs because of the ease of access, its constant availability, and the ability to present it in a visually pleasing and understandable format. Second, through e-mail and chat rooms, the Internet facilitates communication across distances, across time, and across disparate social groups and institutions. This communication channel can also support transactions between government and citizens (Musso et al., 2010, p.3). Since Facebook opened Fan Pages to private and public organizations in 2007, the private and public sectors have jumped to capitalize on the efficient and inexpensive power of Facebook to communicate strategically with their client base (Strecker, 2011, p.3). Social media have opened up new possibilities for organizations to connect with their interest groups by allowing them to receive real-time feedback about organizational announcements and engage in conversations (Lovejoy, Waters & Saxton, 2012: 313). Social media drive innovation in public service delivery and government operations and can help governments improve communications, both in proactive and reactive (Mickoleit, 2014, p. 5). Sending public messages demonstrates responsiveness and establishes a dialog between users and the organization. Users direct questions and comments to the organization using a public message, and organizations should acknowledge and respond to these messages (Lovejoy et al., 2012, p. 314). This new paradigm makes government more transparent, more accountable, and more trustworthy, since the citizens, government officials and others participate in policymaking, content creation, data collection, knowledge sharing and structuring, and collaborative decision making (Chun et al., 2010, 5-6). In their recent study, Karkin and Jannsen (2014, p.356) were measured citizen engagement to understand whether websites employ tools designed for collecting citizen proposals for better local public service provision, citizen satisfaction questionnaires, live broadcasting for council meetings or public procurement procedures or direct communication addresses by the Mayor or Council Members by the presence of Web 2.0 tolls directed to citizen engagement was also evaluated as a website feature. Cumbie and Kar (2016, p.15) examines the concept of electronic government (e-government) inclusiveness and evaluates the inclusiveness of local e-government websites. They suggested more inclusiveness on governments websites and offered two strategic options. Eliason and Lundberg, (2006, p.48) identified seven website genres named notice-board, newspaper, brochure, promotion, commercial, portal, and filter. They argued that these genres differ in terms of formi content, purpose and users of websites. Liste and Sorensen, (2015, p.733) analysed the websites of Norwegian local governments and implied construction of the users of these websites, with an emphasis on website content and underlying aims of the local governments. From social media perspective, many researchers pointed out that social media allow municipalities to contact their audience faster and interactive. For example, Bonson et al. (2012) highlighted that social media enhance local governments transparency and increase e-participation that opens a real corporate dialog. Similarly, Agostino (2013) found that considering unofficial presences, almost all of municipalities uses Facebook, while only one-third of them uses Twitter and 40 % of them have YouTube account. When considered official presence, Facebook usage falls to 26%, following by YouTube by 19% and Twitter by 14% respectively.
3. METHODOLOGY
The sample for this study consisted of 30 Izmir local municipalities and İzmir metropolitan municipality itself. The municipalities and their mayors, populations and internet sites could be seen in Appendix A. As we mentioned before, in this study presence of municipalities on digital platforms has been examined. In this respect, websites of municipalities have been investigated from several aspects. Evaluation criteria in previous studies such as (Karkin & Janssen, 2014; Criado & Ramilo, 2003; Gandía, Marrahí & Huguet, 2016; Royo, Yetano & Acerete, 2013) have been analyzed and to evaluate website efficiency of municipalities of city of İzmir, a new questionnaire has been created. Quantal response criteria have been shown in Table 1.
Additional to these criteria, external social media links such as Facebook, Tweet, Instagram and RSS, broken links on website, different language support and smart phone application existence on Google Play Store or IOS are also investigated. Beyond these, municipalities' social network sites -if exists- have been examined to investigate their social media presence. For municipalities' twitter accounts, some criteria such as; number of followers, number of following, number of tweets, number of shared videos/photos, number of likes, date of attendance and confirmation status have been analyzed. Similarly, for Instagram accounts; number of followers, number of following, number of posts, confirmation status andtag usage; for Facebook accounts; number of followers, number of page likes and confirmation status, finally for Youtube accounts; number of subscribers and number of shared videos have been analyzed.
4. RESULTS and FINDINGS
Results of the website evaluation criteria analysis are shown in Table 2.
Considering the quantal response statements, maximum score (22) belongs to İzmir Metropolitan Municipality which could be said usual. On the other hand along the local municipalities belongs to Gaziemir municipality. They have 21 points out of 27 statements. This means Gaziemir municipalities carried out almost 77% of necessities that we specified. The lowest score belongs to Güzelbahçe municipality. They could perform only 9 necessities within 27. It is possible to see other municipalities' scores in Table 2.
Also one can find detailed information on this subject in Appendix B. As for that municipalities' websites in terms of social media links, 2 local municipalities (Urla and Menemen) have no links for their social network sites on their website. On the other hand, municipalities like Seferihisar, Ödemiş, Kiraz, Karşıyaka and Bornova draw attention on this issue. They active on almost every social network sites and they have links to connect them on their websites. When taken into account the broken links of municipalities' websites; Çiğli and Ödemiş websites have the highest number of broken links, 416 and 427 respectively. And also their broken links ratios (20,8% and 21,4%) are also high in a similar way.
This means, one of five links on their websites are broken. On the other side Konak website has the lowest number (1) and lowest ratio (0,1%) of broken links. Çeşme and Güzelbahçe municipalities which are good at this factor. It could be told that local municipalities of İzmir are quite weak respecting different language support on their website. Only 7 out of 30 municipalities have different language support rather than Turkish and 4 of them have just English language. This is a significant weakness for a touristic city such as İzmir. With regard to the smart applications of municipalities, 13 of along to 30 municipalities have no smart mobile application. Results of social network sites analysis in terms of followers, sharing effectiveness, date of attendance, confirmation status, etc. are shown in Table 3 and Table 4. Table 3 contains some statistics on Twitter while Table 4 contains on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
When analyzed Twitter statistics of local municipalities, it has been found that, 8 local municipalities have no Twitter (see Table 3). İzmir Metropolitan Municipality have 66371 followers and their date of attendance to Twitter is July 2012. This account has posted 5199 tweets up to now and almost 90% of them are photos or videos. Bornova municipality has the highest followers (26267) considering local municipalities. Urla municipality is the first municipality who has a Twitter account in İzmir. Their date of attendance is May 2010. When it comes to confirmation status, just 4 municipalities have confirmed Twitter account. It could be said it is dangerous in digital platforms, because it could lead to fake accounts.
With regard to other social network sites; for Instagram, Karşıyaka has the highest number (17095) of followers, for Facebook Bornova has the highest number (70684) of followers and for Youtube Aliağa has the highest number of (937) subscribers. It is favorable to see that every municipality who has Instagram account also uses tags to reach related people easily. Detailed information about Instagram, Facebook and Youtube usage of municipalities could be gathered in Table 4.
5. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
The alteration and transformation in information and communication technologies have differentiated and diversified the communication of the municipalities with the public. Websites of the municipalities and social media accounts (facebook, twitter, youtube etc.) have created a fast and effective communication channel between the public and the municipality. Another important issue in terms of municipalities is how they adapt to this change in technology. In this study, web sites and social media accounts of 30 district municipalities within the borders of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality were examined. In the research, we've tried to determine how the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality and 30 district municipalities use the digital platforms in communication with the public. Accordingly, web sites and social media accounts of municipalities are effective in promoting municipal services. Nevertheless, citizens come up with issues in terms of application features. Particularly, these issues item from the technical deficiencies of the municipalities. Following the related analyses, it is seen that only Izmir Metropolitan Municipality and other 6 district municipalities support foreign languages on their internet sites. The rest of the 24 municipalities do not have the foreign-language view option on the website. Another finding is related to social media account usage. The finding of the research indicates that social media accounts of municipalities (facebook, twitter, instagram etc.) are not mostly confirmed accounts. This situation may lead to the opening of counterfeit accounts for municipalities. Based on the research findings, recommendations can be made to the municipalities for web sites and social media studies. First, municipalities should use social media tools simultaneously and collectively. Any activity, news, information, content etc. should be announced concurrently to the public. Thus, it can be ensured that target groups using different social media tools are aware of any content without overlooking it. Second; the technical infrastructure of the web sites must be continuously improved, and the content of the web sites must be kept up to date. Especially since it adresses to socially and culturally diverse groups of people, the use of web sites should be facilitated. Besides, considering the growing use of mobile devices in terms of their citizens, municipalities should support mobile devices with applications and accord them with their municipal services. Research is limited to İzmir province. For this reason, the dimensions in this study can be used for similar studies. In particular, it may allow comparison between other metropolitan municipalities and district municipalities.
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