Listening to the community

We present a preliminary analysis of the tasks and information needs of users performing social media monitoring to improve government services. In general, our aim is to explore how text analysis tools can support a social media monitoring task in the government context. We find that, in this context, social media monitoring is a complex activity. Social media monitors not only perform traditional media monitoring tasks, but they also take specific actions to provide an improved service, predominantly by checking and vetting information contributed by the wider online community. In our analysis, we found a number of specific information-based actions performed in order to determine how one should respond to a particular social media post.