Kenneth Griggs and Rosemary Wild
Figure 1 is a graphical representation of the structure of our proposed adoption model. The factors captured in the model are quantifiable so a weighted scoring model or a Delphi technique can be used to perform a comparison of different SNA’ s. In addition, the model can be used in the design of custom SNA’ s.
Figure 1: Model of social networking application assessment
4. Explorations of the application of the adoption model in government organizations
The following are recent examples of the use of SNA’ s by governments with a commentary about their applicability to the adoption model proposed in this paper:“ Low,”“ medium,” and“ high” rankings were applied to the adoption characteristics to illustrate the concept.
4.1 The use of Facebook and Twitter by the U. S. Embassy in Egypt
In a largely unforeseen political movement in 2008, several Egyptian citizens launched a pro‐democracy Facebook group to protest their government’ s policies. In addition, the group used Twitter during the incipient movement to coordinate its activities. Within a week of its inception, the group had attracted 40,000 members. Years later and largely in response to the effectiveness of SNA’ s by the movement, the U. S. embassy in Cairo created its own comparatively sophisticated Facebook and Twitter presence. By using Facebook and Twitter in a relatively unrestricted mode, the embassy had chosen a high risk, high value, and highly expansionary design with the following characteristics:
• Expansion‐related
• Virality – High; with no restrictions on viral expansion
• Geospatiality – Medium; confined to the Middle East region; self‐reporting of locations allowed, but no automatic location / interactive map reporting( known as geotagging)
• Temporality – Low; with apparent monitoring for temporality( speed of posting is delayed based on the context of political events)
• Value‐related
• Media quality – High; use of media including video, audio, graphics with monitored insertion by nonembassy‐affiliated posters. Postings can be made in Arabic and an English language translation capability is a clickable feature
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