7 Unexpected (but Great) Ways the Government is Using Social Media

Have you read George Orwell’s "1984"? If not, you may soon be one of the few who haven’t. Sales of the 1945-published dystopian novel have recently surged after whistleblower Ed Snowden exposed the NSA’s top-secret Internet surveillance program, PRISM. It’s clear people are feeling increasingly edgy about their government and the technology that’s helping it (allegedly) violate their personal freedoms. A recent Washington Post poll shows that 85 percent of respondents are against the US government monitoring their personal Internet data.

But technology plus government doesn’t always equal dark and shady. Like all powerful forces, it’s a double-edged sword.

Many forward-thinking governments around the world are actually using social media to help citizens and make their lives better. I’ve seen it from the frontlines working at a social media company that makes tools to connect governments and other organizations with millions of users. Big data, plus better tools for processing it, are enabling governments to use social networks for good.

Here are 7 weird and wonderful ways that governments around the world are using social media:

1. To detect earthquakes before they happen: When a 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Northeast in 2011, many New Yorkers learned about it on Twitter - seconds before the shaking actually started. Tweets from people at the epicenter near Washington, D.C., outpaced the quake itself, providing a unique early warning system. (Conventional alerts, by contrast, can take two to 20 minutes to be issued.) Seeking to take advantage of these crowdsourced warnings, the U.S. Geological Survey is now hard at work on TED, short for Twitter Earthquake Dispatch. It uses specialized software to gather real-time messages from Twitter, applying place, time and keyword filters to create real-time accounts of shaking.

2. To save taxpayers money: While tales of $600 Navy toilet seats may be urban legend (or maybe not), government agencies could always stand to tighten belts a bit. And no one knows this better than public workers themselves. So, for the past four years, the White House has crowdsourced a competition to trim wasteful spending. Federal employees submit ideas to SAVE, a social site that compiles proposals and allows people to vote on them (19,000 proposals were posted in a recent year, attracting some 46,000 votes). Among this year’s finalists: A suggestion to replace costly court reporters with digital transcription equipment and software.

3. For sharing presidential beer recipes: “Hey everybody - this is barack.” So began (short for Ask Me Anything) last August on social news site Reddit. For the next half hour, Obama fielded a series of unfiltered questions posed by Reddit users, on everything from tax cuts and Internet freedom to the White House beer recipe. 200,000 people tuned in, submitting more than 6,000 comments in 34 minutes. After praising the experiment for “strengthen[ing] our democracy,” Obama got back to the business of running the free world. Governments of all levels have also used similar Q&A sessions on Twitter to break down the walls of power. HootSuite and other social media management tools can help monitor keywords and hashtags during these events, letting a conversation of thousands unfold in real time.

4. For getting the power back on faster: North America’s aging energy grid is notoriously temperamental, averaging 214 minutes worth of outages per year in the Northeast (versus only 4 minutes in Japan). Until there’s money for an overhaul, however, at least we have social media. Right now, power companies are using geotagged posts as a real-time source of information on outages. Angry customers left in the dark (literally) tend to flood Twitter and Facebook with complaints sent from their cell phones. Using analytical tools and social media command centers to monitor the volume and origin of posts, municipal and private power companies can assess the severity of the outages and determine where to direct resources.

5. To help us prepare for a zombie apocalypse: Taking a page from Orson Welles, the Centers for Disease Control recently terrified readers with a blog post titled Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. “[Where] do zombies come from and why do they love eating brains so much?” the author asks, before listing ways to prepare for the inevitable. The post, which also explained how to get ready for real emergencies, attracted more than 1200 comments, with a lively debate ensuing between readers on the finer points of zombie culture and emergency preparedness.

While not a social network in the strict sense of the word, the CDC blog does illustrate how governments can use online channels to engage and educate. More recent posts have focused on what the popular board game Pandemic can teach us about how disease spreads.

6. To keep our streets cleaner: Anyone who’s waited all day in line at the DMV knows that government agencies aren’t always keen on customer service. But does it have to be that way? Take something as simple as weekly garbage collection. In the city of Vancouver, confusing schedules were leading to overflowing bins on streets and in homes. So the city turned to Twitter. It set up a website where residents could sign up to be tweeted the night before garbage and recycling collection. Specialized bulk tweeting and scheduling tools made it possible. Result: Cleaner streets and sparkling customer service at a fraction of the cost of traditional phone centers or email.

7. To stop epidemics: In January 2010, in the wake of a tragic earthquake, Haiti suffered through a cholera epidemic. The disease spread throughout devastated neighborhoods faster than health care workers could respond, killing more than 6,500 people. Authorities ultimately turned to Twitter to stop it, notes ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe, who reported on many of these innovations. Using specialized software, they were able to track the number and location of cholera-related tweets, pinpointing outbreaks well in advance of official warnings. The sheer quantity of public data shared on Twitter, Facebook and other networks makes social media an invaluable listening and tracking tool. With the right software to filter and analyze keyword streams, authorities can identify trends - from outbreaks to traffic problems - in almost real time.

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Image by Africa Renewal.